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

The anatomy of an AWS JSON policy document

Most, but not all, policy types are written and stored as JSON documents within AWS. These include identity-based policies, resource-based policies, permissions boundaries, organizational service control policies, and session policies. Access control lists use a distinct syntax, depending on the service where it is being applied:

Figure 4.2 – A policy document, its components, and the elements of its statements

Let's take a look at the preceding diagram. Here, we can see a logical example of a policy document and its constituent components. Within the main document, there is a Top-level element that contains policy-wide information, followed by one or more statements. Each of these statements describes a permission or entitlement through the information contained within its individual elements.

We can see these elements within the JSON of a policy document by examining any of the existing policies available...