Chapter 2: Protecting Your AWS Account Using IAM

In the previous chapter, while setting up AWS tools, we assigned administration access to the user. However, there is a significant risk involved in doing this as that particular user can perform any action, such as deleting the instance, wiping out S3 buckets, and so on. To address that, in this chapter, we will see how IAM is a set of features that allows us to create and manage users and groups and, at the same time, give them allow or deny permissions via IAM policies to access AWS resources.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

• Creating IAM users and groups
• Understanding IAM policies
• Creating IAM roles
• Introducing AWS Security Token Service (STS)
• Real-time use case of launching a specific instance using CloudFormation
• Rotating IAM credentials using Boto3

Let's get started!