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

Putting it all together – creating a functional IAM user with the AWS CLI

Now that we have created RBI_Admin as a new IAM user object, let's use the AWS CLI to assign it credentials for both the Management Console and the AWS CLI, and give full administrator access to our AWS account. As I mentioned earlier, identity objects used for authorization decisions (groups, permission boundaries, user policies, and so on), those used for authentication (credentials), and those used for identification (user objects) are all fully independent IAM objects within AWS IAM. What makes them work as we expect them to work is their relationships with each other. This relationship is most readily seen through attributes on one of those objects referencing another. We will be using the AWS CLI to establish those relationships. Before we begin, let's take a moment to map out what it is we want to achieve, as this may help us understand how and why certain AWS CLI commands are invoked...