Book Image

Implementing Identity Management on AWS

By : Jon Lehtinen
Book Image

Implementing Identity Management on AWS

By: Jon Lehtinen

Overview of this book

AWS identity management offers a powerful yet complex array of native capabilities and connections to existing enterprise identity systems for administrative and application identity use cases. This book breaks down the complexities involved by adopting a use-case-driven approach that helps identity and cloud engineers understand how to use the right mix of native AWS capabilities and external IAM components to achieve the business and security outcomes they want. You will begin by learning about the IAM toolsets and paradigms within AWS. This will allow you to determine how to best leverage them for administrative control, extending workforce identities to the cloud, and using IAM toolsets and paradigms on an app deployed on AWS. Next, the book demonstrates how to extend your on-premise administrative IAM capabilities to the AWS backplane, as well as how to make your workforce identities available for AWS-deployed applications. In the concluding chapters, you’ll learn how to use the native identity services with applications deployed on AWS. By the end of this IAM Amazon Web Services book, you will be able to build enterprise-class solutions for administrative and application identity using AWS IAM tools and external identity systems.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: IAM and AWS – Critical Concepts, Definitions, and Tools
9
Section 2: Implementing IAM on AWS for Administrative Use Cases
13
Section 3: Implementing IAM on AWS for Application Use Cases

Provisioning administrative accounts in AWS – SCIM provisioning

System for Cross-domain Identity (SCIM) provisioning is a standards-based RESTful account provisioning service that sends account information in a standardized JSON format. When we enable automatic provisioning with SCIM, the directory objects that we specify for our IDP to synchronize in the user store for our AWS SSO service will automatically be created, updated, and deleted, in tandem with their counterparts inside the user store of our external IDP.

How SCIM works

Before we enable SCIM for our example use case, let's take a quick look at how SCIM operates:

Figure 9.17 – SCIM create and update flows

The SCIM provisioning flows for creating and updating accounts are rather straightforward:

  1. The IDP that acts as the authoritative source for provisioning in the service provider's user store pushes the accounts and attributes based on that service provider...