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

Using Managed AD and trusts

We will bring our non-administrative users into AWS using a Managed AD instance in AWS Directory Services. Strictly speaking, we don't even need to import our user's accounts into the Managed AD environment in order to accomplish our goal. We can arrange for the Managed AD instance to perform lookups and binds against our on-premises AD forest using a trust. A trust allows two or more AD domains to authenticate against resources that are available in the other:

Figure 11.9 – A user signing in to an app through a domain trust

Consider the example in Figure 11.9. An AWS-hosted application that requires either AD or LDAP for user authentication or authorization is configured to look to an AWS Managed AD instance for user information. The Managed AD and the on-premises AD have a two-way trust:

  1. The user signs in to the application.
  2. The application looks to the Managed AD to verify the user's credentials...