Getting set up with IAM

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 







Overview

AWS IAM offers secured control and access to your AWS and account resources while simultaneously keeping your account credentials private. As a well known fact IAM offers you a variety of advantages while without it, you either have to create an AWS account or the security credentials of an AWS account should be shared by your employees; moreover, you also can't control the tasks a particular user can do via particular AWS resources.

Using IAM to Give Users Access to Your AWS Resources

The following measures can be taken to control access to your AWS resources:

Type of Access

Why would I use it?

Access for users in your AWS account.

If you want to add/create users via IAM and manage their permissions.

Non-AWS user access via identity federation between your authorization system and AWS.

If you have non-AWS users who requires access to your AWS resources.

Cross-account access between AWS accounts.

If you want to share access to particular AWS resources with users having other AWS accounts.

 

Do I need to Sign Up for IAM?

Although it's unnecessary to sign up to use IAM as it is free of cost, it's necessary to create an AWS account in order to use it. IAM only works with AWS products that are integrated with IAM. Now, if you want to sign up for AWS, you have to:

  1. Open https://portal.aws.amazon.com/billing/signup.
  2. Follow the online instructions.

You might also receive a phone call for a verification code. After signing up with AWS account, an AWS account root user is created who has access to all the AWS services and resources in the account and it's more secure to provide administrative access to an administrative user while using the root user for the tasks that requires root user only.


















































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