Summary

Now that you've made it through this chapter, you have a much better understanding of the best practices for administrating and securing AWS IAM-managed user accounts, including the root account. Additionally, you have learned why the root account merits extra consideration and why certain administrative functions are best left to managed IAM user objects. This chapter also increased your understanding of password, access key, and MFA device management within an AWS account, including how to perform those functions programmatically using the AWS CLI. Finally, you were introduced to what makes federated users different from AWS IAM users, in order to ensure you had a complete understanding of how principals use both to interact with AWS services.

Now that we have discussed managing our AWS IAM users and the various ways we can authenticate them, it is time to turn our attention to controlling what they can do within an AWS account afterward. This is access management...