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

Chapter 5: Introducing Amazon Cognito

So far, we have approached identity for AWS in the context of managing authentication and authorization to AWS resources within an AWS account. We've examined the primary service that governs that access, known as AWS IAM, and seen how user accounts are managed, how their credentials are administrated, and how authorization policies are applied. Most of these use cases focus on using AWS in the context of an Infrastructure as a Service platform.

Amazon Cognito is, above all, a service for applications, with documentation and examples targeted at application developers. In fact, many of the use cases attempt to solve certain use cases by offering reference implementations that further enmesh the application architecture into AWS. This is what we mean when we say that Amazon Cognito offers identity services for AWS in the context of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and that AWS IAM handles identity for AWS as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS...