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

Introducing the AWS access policy types

We've mentioned the word policy before. In an organizational, regulatory, or legal setting, a policy represents the rules, patterns, and guidance meant to steer a decision-making process. In the context of IAM, a policy is how things such as business logic, security controls, and compliance requirements are translated into an access management system, such as AWS IAM. Within AWS IAM, policy are objects that specifically spell out the permissions of a principal or resource they are attached to. This can be seen in the following diagram:

Figure 4.1 – An example of policy objects that can apply to one or more AWS objects

Access policies can apply to IAM objects, as shown in the preceding diagram. They can also apply to specific AWS objects, such as S3 buckets, or even across multiple AWS accounts under the management of an AWS Organization.

In some regards, an AWS access policy can be thought of as a &apos...