Category: How-To

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices recommend using IAM users or roles to access your AWS resources, instead of using your root credentials. If you follow this best practice, though, how can you monitor for root activity and take action if such activity occurs? AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch provide the solution. In […]

Note from September 20, 2017: Based on customer feedback, we have moved the process outlined in this post to the official AWS documentation. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has a list of best practices that you are encouraged to use. One of those best practices is to enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your AWS root […]

Feb 21 2023: This post is out of date. AWS now recommends using IAM Identity Center for federated identities accessing AWS by the CLI. Please see this post for more info: AWS CLI v2 Preview Now Supports AWS Single Sign-On Important note from July 18, 2019: The original version of this blog uses Python2.x scripts. […]

Let’s face it—not all APIs were created equal. For example, you may be really interested in knowing when any of your Amazon EC2 instances are terminated (ec2:TerminateInstance), but less interested when an object is put in an Amazon S3 bucket (s3:PutObject). In this example, you can delete an object, but you can’t bring back that […]

Earlier this year, the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team announced support for the Switch Role feature, which allows your users to switch between accounts in the AWS Management Console. The benefit to your users is that they can switch accounts without being required to sign out and sign in for each account. In […]

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) recently launched managed policies, which enable you to attach a single access control policy to multiple entities (IAM users, groups, and roles). Managed policies also give you precise, fine-grained control over how your users can manage policies and permissions for other entities. For example, you can control which managed […]

When you need to grant access to your AWS resources to a third party, we recommend you do so using an IAM role with external ID. In this post, Josh Bean, a programmer writer on the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team, walks you through a scenario to show you how. At times, you […]

July 26, 2017, update: We recommend that you use cross-account access by switching roles in the AWS Management Console. Also see the related documentation: Switching to a Role (AWS Management Console). Last December we described how you can delegate access to your AWS account using IAM roles. Using IAM roles, you can take advantage of […]

Update from January 17, 2018: The techniques demonstrated in this blog post relate to traditional SAML federation for AWS. These techniques are still valid and useful. However, AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) provides analogous capabilities by way of a managed service. If you are just getting started with federating access to your AWS accounts, we recommend […]

Note: As of March 28, 2017,  Amazon EC2 supports tagging on creation, enforced tag usage, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resource-level permissions, and enforced volume encryption. See New – Tag EC2 Instances & EBS Volumes on Creation on the AWS Blog for more information. AWS announced initial support for Amazon EC2 resource-level permissions in July of […]