Summary and Quiz

Let’s look at some key takeaways from this section and then we’ll put our learnings to a test by attempting a quiz.

Summary

Here’s a summary of the key takeaways from this section:

• IAM: IAM (Identity and Access Management) is a security and management service that provides external entities with secure access to AWS services or resources within the AWS account. It takes care of both authentication and authorization.

• IAM policy: An IAM policy is a JSON document that allows us to define the scope of permissions of the principal entities. There are six types of IAM policies:

  • Identity-based policy

  • Resource-based policy

  • Permission boundary policy

  • Session policy

  • ACL

  • SCP

  The circumstances determine the type of IAM policy to be used.

• IAM user: An IAM user is an IAM resource we can use to provide long-term AWS Management Console access to an external user. When using an AWS account for a longer period, the best practice is to create IAM user accounts for each operation unit. This helps us secure our root account and also prevents the user from performing any unwanted actions.

• IAM roles: An IAM role is an IAM resource we can use to provide short-term AWS access to the requesting entity. IAM roles usually have both identity-based and resource-based policies attached to them that are used for authorization and authentication, respectively.

• AWS Audit Manager: This service allows us to audit our AWS resources and simplifies how we manage and assess risk in compliance with industry standards. It automates the process of collecting evidence, allowing us to ensure the policies, activities, and procedures we have created are working as expected.

• AWS Artifact: It is an AWS-managed repository of security and compliance reports and select online agreements. We can utilize these reports to demonstrate the compliance of our AWS infrastructure.