If there is a service that we have seen used in most if not all the courses we crafted about AWS, that service is IAM. That’s just one more reason why you should learn IAM as soon as you start your journey in AWS to improve your profile as a cloud professional.
Indeed, IAM is probably central in any infrastructures, even for the smaller ones. IAM allows you to assign granular access permissions to each resource in your cloud to your users, or to groups of users. To grant those permissions, you write JSON documents using a standardized syntax, and upload them via the usual APIs, SDK, CLI or AWS Console. IAM also has many interesting features, for example, it allows you to grant access to federated users, that is members of your organizations that are not on AWS, a very nice move by Amazon to help integrate your existing team.
So now you should be well aware of how important is for you to learn IAM, and the new course that our expert David Clinton crafted for you can really help you get started with it.
This three-part course is thought as a clear and quick introduction to IAM. After an introductory lecture, you will dive into IAM learning all the founding concepts of the service, like users, roles, policies, etc. Given how important these concepts are, it’s important to have a clear mind about it as you watch the rest of the course. After that, an important lecture about MFA. Given that IAM is about hardening your infrastructure, you should really ensure that you and just you can control its settings. 2-steps authentication can be a great help to prevent strangers from playing with your sensitive settings.
After the first testing lecture, the second part of this course to learn IAM is all about the practical use of it. You will learn about how to create Users and Groups, how Roles work, and how to create Custom Policies. That’s an important topic, given that most of the policies you will ever write are probably customized by you according to your needs. David will show you how to use the Policy Generator from the AWS Console to do that. Another round of quizzes follows here. The question you will be asked will help you to strengthen your knowledge about what you’ve learned so far.
Finally, the last lecture is a practical example to see how you can log IAM events on CloudTrail.
I hope you will like this course as much as I liked it, so feel free to share your feedback with us. And if you are wondering what we are working on and will publish soon, check our training library roadmap, where you can take a look at the upcoming content for the next weeks.
If you’re interested to learn more about AWS Identity & Access Management, I recommend the Cloud Academy’s AWS: Overview of AWS Identity & Access Management (IAM). Watch this short video for an overview of the course.
