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

Assigning access to AWS accounts

Now that we can sign in to AWS SSO with our external IDP, we need to assign accounts to users within AWS SSO in order to close the loop between the authorization controlled by the IDP and the authorization controlled by AWS. If we considered the IDP's authorization control coarse-grained, AWS SSO provides options for fine-grained control through a variety of mechanisms. Let's start with some basic authorization controls and refine the permissions further as we go.

We can see all of our AWS accounts listed in the AWS accounts menu inside AWS SSO, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

Figure 10.6 – Our AWS accounts

Presently, we have no users assigned to any of them. We also do not have any permission sets assigned to any of the accounts. A permission set defines what an AWS user can do within an AWS account when signing in through AWS SSO. A permission set is stored as an AWS IAM role that is assumed...