Book Image

AWS for System Administrators

By : Prashant Lakhera
Book Image

AWS for System Administrators

By: Prashant Lakhera

Overview of this book

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most popular and efficient cloud platforms for administering and deploying your applications to make them resilient and robust. AWS for System Administrators will help you to learn several advanced cloud administration concepts for deploying, managing, and operating highly available systems on AWS. Starting with the fundamentals of identity and access management (IAM) for securing your environment, this book will gradually take you through AWS networking and monitoring tools. As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll get to grips with VPC, EC2, load balancer, Auto Scaling, RDS database, and data management. The book will also show you how to initiate AWS automated backups and store and keep track of log files. Later, you’ll work with AWS APIs and understand how to use them along with CloudFormation, Python Boto3 Script, and Terraform to automate infrastructure. By the end of this AWS book, you’ll be ready to build your two-tier startup with all the necessary infrastructure, monitoring, and logging components in place.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: AWS Services and Tools
4
Section 2: Building the Infrastructure
7
Section 3: Adding Scalability and Elasticity to the Infrastructure
11
Section 4: The Monitoring, Metrics, and Backup Layers

Understanding IAM policies

An IAM policy is a JSON-formatted document that defines which action a user, group, or role can perform on AWS resources. When users or roles make a request, the AWS policy engine evaluates these policies and, depending on the permission defined in the policy request, is either allowed or denied. Once again, I want to re-emphasize the point that IAM policies are used for authorization. For authentication purposes, we are going to use IAM users.

Note

By default, all requests are implicitly denied, and IAM identities (user, group, or role) have no permissions or policies attached by default.

AWS supports four types of policies:

  • Identity-based policies: To grant permission to any identity, which can be users, groups, or roles, we can use identity-based policies.
  • Resource-based policies: This policy is mostly used with resources, such as an S3 bucket or KMS keys to grant permissions to a principal.
  • Permissions boundaries: Permissions...