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 AWS SSO?

AWS SSO is another IDaaS capability available from AWS, similar in some regards to Amazon Cognito. Whereas Amazon Cognito provides application identity capabilities, AWS SSO facilitates centralized administration for federated access to AWS accounts, as well as general identity provider capabilities. AWS SSO offers free account management, authentication services, and a strong authentication capability for AWS accounts and applications managed under an AWS organization. AWS SSO users can authenticate to one or more AWS accounts using either accounts and credentials managed by AWS SSO itself, or through accounts synched from an external authoritative source, such as an enterprise-managed directory and identity provider.

We mentioned that one of the primary use cases of AWS SSO was centralized user management and federated authentication to all AWS accounts within an AWS organization. We discussed AWS Organizations briefly at the end of Chapter 3, IAM User Management...