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 Amazon Cognito?

Amazon Cognito provides identity management, user authentication, and authorization for web applications. Amazon Cognito is a service that externalizes the components for application user identity management and authorization for application developers who do not wish to manage those items within the context of their own application. The Amazon Cognito service, within a given AWS account, can accommodate several distinct collections of user accounts, called pools. While Amazon Cognito is an identity service, it is distinct from AWS IAM in terms of its purpose and functionality. However, there are use cases and design patterns where Amazon Cognito and AWS IAM interact:

Figure 5.1 – The Amazon Cognito service from within the Management Console

Like nearly everything else in AWS, Amazon Cognito can be fully configured using both the Administrative Console and the AWS CLI. As shown in the preceding screenshot, Amazon Cognito offers...