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 brought our user's identity information into AWS so that it could be consumed by applications hosted on AWS. First, we considered how administrative and non-administrative identity use cases differ. Then, we examined several different solution architectures to solve the challenge of bringing user identity information into AWS. Finally, we built a solution that enabled AWS-deployed applications to access user information through our organization's authoritative sources. We did this by using AWS Directory Services and building a trust between our on-premises Active Directory and a Managed AD domain created within our AWS account.

In the next chapter, we will discuss how to use AWS-native identity services, such as Amazon Cognito, to solve application identity use cases while still deferring to our external IDP as the authoritative source of user identity information.