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Amazon IAM

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Aw Security Automation Governance Access Control Cloud Security Least Privilege DEVOPS AWS

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description Amazon IAM Overview

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the core security service that controls who (users, roles, services) can do what (permissions) on which resources. Adhering to the principle of least privilege using IAM is non-negotiable for cloud security. It allows administrators to create granular policies, ensuring that only necessary permissions are granted, thereby minimizing the blast radius of any potential breach.

help Amazon IAM FAQ

What is the difference between an AWS IAM user and an IAM role?

An IAM user is a long-lived identity that can have credentials, while a role is assumed temporarily by a person, AWS service, or external workload. AWS recommends temporary role credentials instead of permanent access keys whenever the use case allows it.

Why does an IAM policy say access is denied even when it contains Allow?

An explicit Deny overrides an Allow, and access can also be limited by permissions boundaries, service control policies, resource policies, or session policies. AWS policy evaluation considers all applicable policy types rather than reading one identity policy in isolation.

Is AWS IAM regional or global?

IAM is a global AWS service, so users, groups, roles, and customer-managed policies are not created separately in each region. The resources controlled by those policies, such as an EC2 instance or regional KMS key, can still be region-specific.

Should applications store AWS access keys in environment files?

Applications running on AWS should normally obtain temporary credentials through an EC2 instance profile, ECS task role, EKS identity mechanism, or Lambda execution role. Static keys in an environment file can leak through logs, backups, source control, or compromised processes.

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