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

What is an IAM user account?

In Chapter 1, An Introduction to IAM and AWS IAM Concepts, we introduced the foundational objects that AWS IAM uses to manage authentication and authorization to AWS resources under the context of AWS as an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform. A principal—that is to say, a person or application that wants to access an AWS resource—will present itself using a known IAM object (such as an IAM user or a federated user) to AWS IAM. The principal validates their entitlement to assume that IAM object by confirming a shared secret, such as the IAM user object's password or access key ID and secret access key. By presenting the shared secret for the IAM user object, AWS IAM is able to authenticate the principal or determine who the principal is.

IAM user accounts are distinct user profiles managed by AWS IAM that distinguish and authenticate users within an AWS account. Using the AWS Management Console or the AWS CLI, we can perform...