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

Introducing AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS)

AWS STS is a web service that allows you to request temporary, limited privilege credentials (lasting from 15 minutes to 36 hours) for AWS IAM users or federated users:

Figure 2.2 – AWS STS

Figure 2.2 – AWS STS

The application makes an API request to AWS STS for credentials; STS generates these credentials dynamically. Once the credentials expire, new ones may be requested (as long as the user has permission to do so).

Advantages of AWS STS

The advantages of AWS STS are as follows:

  • Provides temporary security credentials.
  • Short-term credentials lasting from 15 minutes to 36 hours.
  • Credentials are dynamically assigned as requested.
  • No need to rotate/revoke password or access keys.

Use cases

Here are some of the use cases of AWS STS:

  • Identity federation (grants users from outside AWS access to the service)
  • Cross-account access (users or services from other accounts are granted...