AWS — Identity Access Management

Hari Vedam
Jul 28, 2017 · 2 min read

I’ve been playing around with AWS for about a few weeks. What I can say, its a great service. I am going to say other players are catching up. Amazon is just ahead of the curve because they started early. One thing I have to say is Acloud Guru does a great job explaining a lot of the concepts. The reason for writing this blog is more for my education and starting a conversation.

Identity Access Management has some key parts:

  1. User — are people who are trying to access the platform or service. By default, the newly created user doesn’t have any permissions to access the services.
  2. Group — a bunch of users who are trying to access the platform or services

Like for example, you are in organization where you want to create a group called: Research and Development. Once you log into the AWS console, you should see a screen like this:

AWS IAM

Go to the option Groups and follow the steps. Once the group is created, you can add the appropriate users to that group. This is great. How do users and groups relate? Remember I said earlier, a user is single person which will eventually join a group (this will be a lot of users).

You see in the screen shot, roles and policies. The next question you are asking yourself. How do they relate to users and groups in terms of roles and policies?

Roles — gives access to specific service. In order to access those, policies come into play.

Policies — gives certain restrictions to users or groups in order access a specific service. Like for example, If I created a group of users for EC2, I will use a policy either give them full or read only access to my EC2 instance. One important distinction you can either apply a policy to users or groups.

Policies and Roles are very important because you are defining those rules in order to keep your AWS environment in line.

The best way to learn AWS is just experiment which I’m doing. I love learning, experimenting and sharing knowledge.

I’ll always love connecting with people or new job opportunities. Add me on LinkedIn.

Hari Vedam

Written by

I love open source technologies and entrepreneurship

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