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 6: Introduction to AWS Organizations and AWS Single Sign-On

We've said several times that much of the confusion around applying identity to AWS stems from the various identity services available on the platform, and the ambiguity around their appropriate use. So far, we've split services into two groups: those that provide identity for AWS as an infrastructure-as-a-service platform, and those that offer identity capabilities in a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) context. AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) strains this motif. On the one hand, AWS SSO's primary function and capability focuses on facilitating access to AWS resources, specifically AWS accounts within an AWS organization. On the other, it is also capable of being an enterprise-grade identity provider for more than just AWS resources.

By the end of this chapter, we will understand AWS SSO's role in the AWS identity ecosystem, and how it operates as an identity service across AWS.

In this chapter, you...