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

Creating an Amazon Cognito identity pool

Since we now have a user pool that can provide federated identities, we can create an identity pool. Doing so will allow the federated identities from that user pool to access AWS resources. To do this from the Management Console, follow these steps:

  1. Go to the Amazon Cognito service and select Manage Identity Pools.
  2. Since we have no existing identity pools, we are taken directly to the wizard to configure our first one. Let's call this one rbiidentitypool:

    Figure 5.51 – Naming the new identity pool

  3. An interesting capability of identity pools is that they allow unauthenticated users to obtain temporary credentials to access AWS resources. It may seem counterintuitive to permit this, but there may be use cases where access to a resource, such as placing a file into a bucket or adding an entry into an Amazon DynamoDB database, may be deemed so sufficiently low risk that identifying principals taking these actions may...