IAM Identities (users, user groups, and roles) (part 1)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 





To read part 2, please click here





AWS Account Root User

As stated before, whenever an AWS account is created, a single sign-in identity called the AWS account root user is provided that has complete access to all the AWS services as well as the resources in the account. It can also be accessed by signing in via the same email address and password that were used in the beginning to create the account.

Note: It is strongly recommended to not use the root user for your everyday tasks, instead, the root user credentials must be locked away securely and should only be used to perform a few account and service management tasks.

IAM Users

It's an entity that can be created in AWS which also represents the person or service who uses the IAM user to interact with AWS. A user in AWS mainly consists of a name, a password to sign into the AWS management console, and up to two access keys that can be used with the API or CLI. Its primary purpose is to enable the people to successfully sign in to the AWS Management Console for any type of interactive tasks or make programmatic requests to AWS services via API or CLI. 

IAM User Groups

As the name suggests, an IAM user group is a collection of IAM users that can be used to specify permissions in order to make them easier to use or manage for those users. Through a user group, policies can attached to multiple users at a time and it cannot be identified as Principal in a resource-based policy. After an identity-based policy is attached to a user group, all the users in that group receives same permissions from them.

IAM Roles

Similar to a user, IAM roles is an identity with permission policies that also defines what the identity is supposed to do in AWS. As the roles doesn't have any specified credentials, any IAM user can assume them accordingly (in order to temporarily take on different permissions) for a specific task. They can also be assigned to a federated user after AWS determines which role is mapped to the user.

Temporary Credentials in IAM

Although they are primarily used with IAM roles, they also be requested to have more restricted set of permissions to save you from accidently performing the non-permitted tasks by the more restricted credentials. They are more beneficial as they can be expired automatically after a particular period of time set by you.





To read part 2, please click here



































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