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 access management?

As the two words that make up the ''AM'' of IAM, access management represents one of the core functions of IAM as an enabling technology. Access management covers two things, the first of which is the validation that a request comes from a legitimate source. To frame that in AWS IAM terms, it means that it can provide the shared secrets affiliated with their IAM user account to prove the request is valid. This is the authentication side of access management; we dealt with how to authenticate AWS IAM user accounts in depth in Chapter 3, IAM User Management.

The second function of access management is to make sure that the request itself is authorized. This is to say that there is nothing about the request, such as the target of the action, or the location of the object or requestor, or anything else that runs afoul of the rules that apply to that specific request and requestor, which then determine what they should and should not be...