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

Chapter 12: AWS-Hosted Application Single Sign-On Using an Existing Identity Provider

In the previous chapter, we looked at several solution architectures for non-administrative identity use cases. We defined our non-administrative use case as wanting to expose our organization's identity information to applications hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), regardless of whether the account owner had access to the AWS backplane. Most organizations make a distinction between their administrative accounts and their standard user accounts, and often have distinct architectures for each of these use cases. Typically, standard application identity needs are satisfied through the use of standard user accounts. This chapter will focus on addressing the identity needs of AWS-hosted applications.

Whereas we can use native AWS services such as Amazon Cognito to solve application identity challenges on AWS, organizations often have policy or regulatory requirements that require them to demonstrate...