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 3: IAM User Management

Some of the most highly visible objects in identity and access management (IAM) are user accounts. Much of the discipline is centered on securing the credentials for those accounts, ensuring they have proper lifecycle management, and providing the governance to ensure that we can audit and document their proper use. And, of course, issues with accounts and passwords can also cause much user-experience friction in both enterprise and customer environments. All of those challenges are still with us in the cloud. In fact, it is arguable that the stakes for securely managing user accounts within cloud management backplanes are higher, as a loss of control there could have knock-on effects across dozens of apps and on critical enterprise infrastructure. With that in mind, let's take a look at Amazon Web Services (AWS) IAM user management.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

  • What is an IAM user account?
  • Managing and securing...