Introduction to the AWS IAM service

At this point, you should have a single AWS Free Tier account that you can log in to using your chosen email address and password combination. This email address that you have used to create the account is also known as the root user. The root user is the person who created the account and holds the keys to the kingdom. This privileged user must be guarded well, and knowledge of its credentials (passwords and so on) should not be given to anyone who is not authorized to use it. The root user should also not be used for day-to-day operations. You can create additional user accounts (what we call IAM users) to perform daily tasks. We'll look at IAM users shortly in this chapter.

The AWS IAM console

To access any AWS service, including the IAM service, you can either use the web-based management console, the command-line interface (CLI), or AWS SDKs if you are writing code. We will start with the AWS Management Console. Log in to your AWS...