Course Introduction
How IAM is used to securely manage access
Managing user identities with long term credentials in IAM
Managing access using IAM user groups & roles
Using IAM policies to define and manage permissions
Cross-account access
Fundamentals of KMS
Securing Access to Your AWS KMS Keys
AWS Web Application Firewall
AWS Firewall Manager
Using AWS Network Firewalls to Secure Your VPCs
AWS Shield
AWS Security Hub Overview
Other AWS Security Services
Amazon Cognito
Identity Federation
AWS SSO
CloudHSM
AWS Secrets Manager
The course is part of this learning path
This section of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional learning path introduces the key identity management, security, and encryption services within AWS relevant to the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional exam. Core to security is AWS Identity & Access Management commonly referred to as IAM. This service manages identities and their permissions that can access your AWS resources, so understanding how this service works and what you can do with it will help you to maintain a secure AWS environment. IAM is an important service in ensuring your resources are secure.
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Learning Objectives
- Learn about identity and access management on AWS, including users, groups & roles, IAM policies, MFA, identity federation, and cross-account access
- Learn the fundamentals of AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), including what it is, when to use it, how it works, and why use it
- Understand how to configure and monitor AWS WAF
- Learn about AWS Firewall Manager and its components
- Learn how to configure AWS Shield
- Learn the fundamentals of AWS Cognito
The Amazon Cognito Identity pools - also known as Federated Identities, Helps to provide temporary access AWS Credentials for your users or guests that need access to AWS services.
Identity pools can work in tandem with Amazon Cognito user pools, allowing your users to operate and access whatever specific feature they need from AWS.
Additionally, just like with User pools, you can federate with public providers such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google.
The Identity pools help to define two types of identities - Authenticated identities and unauthenticated identities.
Each identity within your identity pool has to be in one of these two states.
To gain the authenticated state, a user must be authenticated by a public login provider. This can be your Amazon Cognito user pool from early, or can also be any of those other public ID providers like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, SAML, and even an Open ID connect provider.
You can also have Unauthenticated identities. This can be useful for a number of reasons, but the primary ones might be for allowing users to see various AWS resources before they are completely logged in. Giving them some visibility into dashboards for example - so they could at a glance see if something was wrong.
You can also use Unauthenticated identities to act as a sort of guest pass for when you want people to have some access to basic services and later prompting them to sign in or sign up.
Each type of identity has a role that goes along with it. Roles have policies attached to them, that set the permissions for what that user is allowed to do within AWS. Roles help to define boundaries and allow you to explicitly state what an authenticated or unauthorized user can, and can not, modify or even see.
If you need a refresher on roles beyond what I’ve just described, please take a look over here for an in-depth look at this feature:
The big thing I want you to think about when differentiating between Identity pools and User pools is that Identity pools are used for authentication and access control ( specifically for AWS services). While user pools are designed for sign-up and sign-in type operations.
Danny has over 20 years of IT experience as a software developer, cloud engineer, and technical trainer. After attending a conference on cloud computing in 2009, he knew he wanted to build his career around what was still a very new, emerging technology at the time — and share this transformational knowledge with others. He has spoken to IT professional audiences at local, regional, and national user groups and conferences. He has delivered in-person classroom and virtual training, interactive webinars, and authored video training courses covering many different technologies, including Amazon Web Services. He currently has six active AWS certifications, including certifications at the Professional and Specialty level.