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

Connecting Amazon Cognito to an external IdP – SAML

Now that we have a user pool configured with attributes that match those found in our external IdP, we need to put some users inside it. We do not want users created directly inside the user pool as that would bypass the external IdP as the authoritative source of identity information for our users. To connect the external IdP with the user pool, we will need to configure our external IdP as an IdP for the user pool, as follows:

  1. From the user pool, we can select the type of federated provider we want to add under the Federation menu. We will select the SAML option, as illustrated in the following screenshot:

    Figure 12.7 – Selecting a new IdP for the user pool

  2. The configuration options are very sparse since it wants to import a metadata file. We will come back to the form shown in the following screenshot since we will need to build this connection on the external IdP side in order to create that metadata file...