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

Understanding AWS Directory Service

Microsoft AD is a complex and feature-rich enterprise directory service. Beyond basic LDAP capabilities for user management and authentication, it can also be used for machine management, including device authentication and authorization, DNS, certificate authority services, endpoint policy management and enforcement, and federation services. Over the years, it has been positioned and marketed as a one-stop-shop for enterprise workloads. Unfortunately, the feature-richness that made AD an enterprise mainstay for over 20 years is also why it can become insecure or misconfigured. This is why AD implementations are at the heart of so many security incidents. Its monolithic nature, broad set of services, and wide network port utilization also make it a tempting target for bad actors and limit its capability to securely operate outside of an established network perimeter.

Though traditional on-premises AD may not be naturally suited for an internet...