IAM roles for best practices in AWS
Identification and Access Management (IAM) is a free of charge service that Amazon Web Services provides to have a better management on an account and resources, this talking in authentication terms. This is a very important issue to have on mind in order to obtain best practices with AWS and the IAM roles.
We have been working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for more than 4 years, and one thing that has really helped us in the administration of all the AWS accounts we manage, is the use of the IAM roles that AWS has.
Using IAM roles
There are several things you can do with the IAM service. Here we list some of the most essential you can do in order to have a better management on your services or account.
- Grant other user permission to your services:
You can grant different permissions to different people based on what do they require to do. You can grant access to Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2 service), the Amazon S3 service or have a combination of services available for one identity. - Creating Access Roles for your Development Team / Any consultant:
Sometimes you work with an external company which will be the one implementing all the infrastructure of yours or will be the one in charge of creating you an application and you probably wouldn’t want to share your root credentials with them. So as a matter of precaution, you can create identities for external people. - Restrict access to resources on AWS:
You can restrict access to any person on your organization or any external, in order to have a better control of who is using which service. This works very well if you have several teams managing one AWS account by developing a new system or application. - Communication between server and services:
Working with another service of Amazon requires you to create an IAM role to validate you are a trustable identity and with the right privileges to use the service, e.g. if you want to serve all your static content through Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).
In conclusion we can say that…
Using AWS IAM roles services to administrate your AWS resources has never been easier to use.
IAM roles helps us to manage our root Amazon Web Services account and provide permissions to different groups or users and assign roles.
Feel free to explore what you can do with IAM roles and take full advantage of this tool for administration.
- Try different types of authentication for any user.
- Lock any type of account or user to perform certain operations on your Amazon environment. (eg. creation and deletion of databases).
- Create an EC2 Role assigning only EC2 management to it.
AWS is a world of features we can use in order to improve the process while working with them. IAM roles is a basic tool in AWS that we widely recommend. Here at ClickIT we are experts on AWS, whenever you need help with your managed services you can contact us below!”.
