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

Defining the use case and solution architecture

Before we begin connecting applications, user pools, and external IdPs, let's take a moment and visualize the solution we intend to build for the use case we want to solve. Once again, we have some familiar components in play for the Redbeard Identity organization, as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 12.1 – Application references Cognito, which looks to the external IdP

In this design, the application will look to an Amazon Cognito user pool for its user information. The user pool will act as the application's user store, and detailed attributes will be provided at authentication time through the Amazon Cognito identity token. Since Amazon Cognito user pools provide a standards-compliant OIDC IdP, additional attributes can be accessed through the /userinfo endpoint as needed, if the application is sufficiently entitled and scoped to have that access. In order to ensure that the Redbeard...