AWS IAM Policy Types

Flexible Access Control for Finer-Grained Permissions

Hello, World! AWS IAM is AWS’s most important service; all AWS services depend on AWS IAM. AWS IAM supports various types of access policies with specific use cases — from managing access across a large number of AWS accounts, to managing access for an individual resource, AWS IAM offers numerous ways to get access control right. So what types of access control policies does IAM offer to its clients?

Note: I’ll only be providing a high-level explanation of the different types of policies supported by AWS IAM. Enjoy!

Policy Types

A IAM policy is an object that defines the permissions attached to an identity or resource. The following policy types supported AWS IAM:

• Identity-based Policies
• Resource-based Policies
• Permission Boundaries
• Service Control Policies (SCPs)
• Session Policies
• Access Control Lists (legacy policy type)

Identity-based Policies

Identity-based policies are policies that define what actions an IAM identity (user, group, or role) are allowed to take against specific resources. A common example of when you would create…