Introducing AWS identity and access management
Identity and access management (IAM) is a service that controls users, roles, and access mechanisms for all your AWS services. Security groups secure services at the VPC resource or instance level; IAM secures services at the account level.
IAM has three main areas, called identities:
- Users: A user is a person who needs to access your AWS services. You can grant a user permission to control what they can and cannot access.
- Groups: A group is a collection of users who will have the same permissions. This is often used to make administration easier.
- Roles: A role is used to define a set of permissions and who can use it. However, it is not assigned directly to a person or a service, but rather a service or person can utilize it when needed. Roles are temporary and, therefore, offer greater protection than granting permanent permissions via groups or users.
To define the access controls, which you will then give...
