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

Summary

In this chapter, we put into practice what we have learned across several AWS services to design and apply an administrative account authentication and authorization model. By using an external IDP, we were able to quickly deprovision access for administrators. Synchronizing our external IDP's users and groups into AWS SSO via SCIM laid the foundation for us to pair coarse-grained authorization control managed at the IDP with a fine-grained authorization policy controlled by AWS to fulfill our administrative authorization business objectives. We wrote a custom authorization policy for our permission sets using conditional operators. Finally, we saw how that model extends into the AWS CLI as well and improves security by eliminating long-lived programmatic credentials.

In the next chapter, we will switch our focus to application-centric identity using Amazon Cognito. We will address making our enterprise user accounts available for our applications hosted in AWS.

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