Comment 7 for bug 732907

I think the point is, Amazon have a username and password, but it's in an authentication system that's completely distinct from the EC2 system. With your Amazon password, you can log in to their auth system and obtain your "access key ID" and "secret access key", but those are just a username/password pair with fancy names.

Presumably, Amazon felt the need to separate your API access from everything else so that you couldn't buy books with someone's EC2 credentials. This doesn't apply to us for two reasons: 1) we don't sell books and 2) we don't have other systems that you can log into.

We can simplify the distinction between "password" and "secret access key" because our password is only useful for one thing.