AWS Identity and Access Management

We’ll start with IAM, whose management dashboard (https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam) connects you to all the administration tools you’ll need to manage the basics of account security. As you can see in Figure 5.1, the Security Status section of that page provides a friendly reminder that there might be some issues requiring your attention.

Those suggestions include protecting your account by locking down the root user (the user identity that was generated when you first created your AWS account) and replacing the effective functionality of root by setting up IAM users and groups for your day-to-day administration tasks. The coming sections will explain both why and how these changes are made.

FIGURE 5.1 The Security Status section of the IAM Dashboard includes important configuration advice that’s especially important for new accounts

Protecting the Root User

For practical reasons, the root user has the permissions necessary...