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

Amazon Cognito use cases

There are several common deployment patterns and use cases that Amazon Cognito accommodates. While each of these patterns may involve different Amazon Cognito, AWS IAM, or other app and AWS service components, they all share the same underlying purpose: to facilitate application identity services on applications deployed on AWS. Let's examine a few of these use cases and patterns and see how the different Amazon Cognito components come into play for each one.

User authentication for application access

The simplest design pattern to accommodate when using Amazon Cognito is fully externalized user account management and authentication. In this pattern, the Cognito user pool acts as the IDP and user store for the application:

Figure 5.3 – Application authentication and user management with a user pool

Applications can take advantage of Amazon Cognito's hosted account management, sign-up, and verification process...