AWS IAM Policies : Best Practices & How to Create an IAM Policy

Securely accessing cloud resources is one of the most critical requirements for IT teams. To achieve this, cloud administrators leverage web services that assist with managing access to cloud environments.

In this article, we will explore the AWS IAM service, and more specifically, we will look into IAM policies, learn how they are structured, how to create them, and some best practices.

What is AWS IAM?

AWS Identity and Access Management(IAM) is a web service that assists with managing and controlling access and permissions to resources and other AWS services. Leveraging this service, we can set up the building blocks to control authentication and authorization to our AWS accounts.

Before we continue talking about IAM, let’s define some terminology for its essential components that we will reference throughout the article.

• Authentication: The process of validating a user’s identity. Basically, verifying who someone claims to be.
• Authorization: Defining the level of permissions and access rights for a given user. Authorization happens after authentication and establishes what someone is allowed to do.
• Principals: Persons or applications that try to perform actions on AWS.