How can I set up an EC2 account for a client?

They don't want to give me their Amazon username and password because it has their complete purchase history.

Is there anyway for开发者_运维知识库 them to authorize me as a user?

Amazon has AWS Identity and Access Management, that should help with what your asking. http://aws.amazon.com/iam/

It's easy enough to create new accounts on Amazon, and it's also reasonable to keep corporate and personal accounts separate for expense purposes. I'd recommend doing that for simplicity, but I understand that it could be a concern regarding potential misuse on the rest of the Amazon site.

The use of access keys (as suggested by @KristianGlass) may be adequate, as well, allowing you to create and kill instances, but not allowing you access to the main AWS console. Elasticfox also works with the EC2 keys, so you could use that as a surrogate for the console.

Depending on what you're looking for, they might just be able to create you an Access Key and have you use that.

If they look under "Security Credentials" in their Account page (this should be a link to it) they can easily "Create a new Access Key" (they will of course need to give you both the Access Key ID and the Secret Access Key).

To paraphrase Amazon's documentation about Access Keys, you can use them for making requests to REST or Query APIs - specifically this includes EC2.