This course provides detail on the AWS Security, Identity, and compliance services relevant to the AWS Developer - Associate exam. These services are used to help secure and protect your resources and environment through access control mechanisms and encryption.
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Learning Objectives
- Learn what Identity Federation is
- Learn about the AWS services that can be used with it
- Understand how it's implemented
- Understand the benefits of AWS SSO and how it can be used to simplify user access at scale
- Create your own authentication mechanisms using Amazon Cognito
- Create your own customized UI for user sign in
- Create a secure user directory for all your applications and users
- Understand what is meant identity and access management and the difference between authentication, authorization, and access control
- Learn the components of IAM as well as its reporting features
- Understand the core principles of cross-account access using IAM
- How to implement and configure cross-account access
- Define how the Key encryption process works
- Explain the differences between the different key types
- Create and modify Key policies
- Understand how to rotate, delete and reinstate keys
- Define how to import your own Key material
Hello and welcome to this lecture where I shall provide an overview of what the Identity & Access Management service is, and what IAM actually means.
Firstly I want to define what is meant by Identity & Access Management and I shall break this down into two parts, starting with Identity Management.
Identities, such as AWS usernames are required to authenticate you to your AWS account, and this authentication process is managed in 2 stages.
- The first part of this process is to define who you are, effectively presenting your identity, so for example your AWS username. This identification is a unique value within IAM for your account, so this means IAM would prevent you from having 2 identical user accounts with the same name within the same AWS account.
- The second part of the authentication process is to verify that you are who you say you are. This is achieved by supplying additional data, and when using our AWS usernames we can verify this by supplying a password
Now, Access Management relates to authorization and access control. Authorization determines what an identity can access within your AWS account once it’s been authenticated to it. An example of this authorization would be the user’s list of permissions to access specific AWS resources, for example, they might have Full Access to EC2 or Read Only to RDS.
Access Control can be classed as the mechanism of accessing a secured resource. For example, using the following:
- Username and password (Authentication and Verification)
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA, used as an additional verification step following a valid password)
- Or Federated Access, which allows users external to AWS to access resources securely without having to supply AWS user credentials from a valid IAM user account. Instead, these credentials are supplied from identity providers. For more information on Identity Federation, please see our existing course here: https://cloudacademy.com/course/using-aws-identity-federation-simplify-access-scale-1549/
So essentially IAM can be defined by its ability to manage, control, and govern authentication, authorization, and access control mechanisms of identities to your resources within your AWS Account.
Having an understanding of the different security controls from an authentication and authorization perspective can help you design the correct level of security for your infrastructure.
Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data center and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation.
To date, Stuart has created 150+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 180,000 students, mostly within the AWS category and with a heavy focus on security and compliance.
Stuart is a member of the AWS Community Builders Program for his contributions towards AWS.
He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape.
In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community.
Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.