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

Managing and securing root IAM user accounts

IAM user accounts are the basic units of accountability when a principal authenticates itself directly through AWS IAM, thus ensuring that those accounts are hardened is foundational to the security of the entire AWS account. However, before we begin on general account management and security, we need to address some peculiarities and best practices of a unique account type.

Differences between root user account and IAM user accounts

We've heard that repetition is key to learning. In both Chapter 1, An Introduction to IAM and AWS IAM Concepts, and Chapter 2, An Introduction to the AWS CLI, we created IAM users using both the AWS Management Console and the AWS CLI. The IAM users that were created were no less capable of doing anything inside of the AWS account by dint of them being members of the Full Administrators group. However, this still was an example of an AWS IAM security best practice. The AWS root account should not be...