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

Summary

Now that you've made it through this chapter, you have a much better understanding of the best practices for administrating and securing AWS IAM-managed user accounts, including the root account. Additionally, you have learned why the root account merits extra consideration and why certain administrative functions are best left to managed IAM user objects. This chapter also increased your understanding of password, access key, and MFA device management within an AWS account, including how to perform those functions programmatically using the AWS CLI. Finally, you were introduced to what makes federated users different from AWS IAM users, in order to ensure you had a complete understanding of how principals use both to interact with AWS services.

Now that we have discussed managing our AWS IAM users and the various ways we can authenticate them, it is time to turn our attention to controlling what they can do within an AWS account afterward. This is access management...