Chapter 1: An Introduction to IAM and AWS IAM Concepts

Identity is the perimeter of security, and every transaction, capability, administrative event, and infrastructure component of cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) ultimately depends upon identity services to govern all its capabilities. If that scope wasn't large enough already, tying AWS' native capabilities to an existing enterprise, customer, administrative, or infrastructure identity deployment can seem so complex as to make it difficult for cloud identity administrators to know how or where to start. This book will help you overcome the paralysis caused by the capabilities of the platform by approaching the implementation of AWS IAM (IAM) in a use case driven fashion, informed by real experiences working in large enterprise AWS environments.

By the end of this chapter, you will be familiar with the foundational concepts of IAM and see how they are applied within an organization. You will learn the purpose of the AWS IAM service, its components, and how they all work together to secure access to AWS resources. Finally, you'll use the AWS Management Console to create and manage AWS IAM resources, including IAM users, groups, and policies.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Understanding IAM
• Exploring AWS IAM
• Putting it all together