Authenticating, authorizing, and managing users
Unless you are making the most basic microservice, the service you create will need to have a security wrapper around it to ensure that only authorized users can access it. Before we can determine whether a user is authorized to access a resource, we need to authenticate the user (make sure that they are who they say they are) – or, in other words:
- Authentication verifies credentials.
- Authorization verifies permissions.
As you can imagine, AWS has offerings to cover these requirements, many of which have been around since AWS first launched. Let's briefly review them.
AWS Identity and Access Management
AWS offers many varied services. One thing that they have in common is that they can all be managed and controlled to determine who can access them via the Identity and Access Management (IAM) service.
Like many other security frameworks and services, it establishes a series of components to enable...