AWS Series - Identity Access Management - IAM - Part 1

Hello All

With IAM, we can centrally manage permissions that control which AWS resources users can access. we use IAM to control who is authenticated (signed in) and authorised (has permissions) to use resources.

When we create an AWS account, you begin with one sign-in identity that has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. This identity is called the AWS account root user and is accessed by signing in with the email address and password that you used to create the account



IAM is mainly using for user management and permission in AWS. With IAM we can manage 


  • User Groups
  • Roles
  • Policies or Permissions 
  • AWS  Command Line Interface [CLI]
  • Access key / Secret Access Key
  • User to service communications
  • Service to service Communications
  • Multi factor Authentication - [MFA]
  • IAM in AWS is Global service and not specific to any regions


Create user group - we will create group and add the user later on this group

This group is to manages full access for EC2 services alone. Members of this groups can only  can access EC2 services , and not any another services , like S3, etc



Adding the users in to the group without console access. We may the console  enable the access later as well. 



Select the group




click next and create group

Creating another user with Console Access and assigning the permission directly 





Select the ec2full access permissions



Create user
Each Account has a Friendly Name (Eg. RAVI ) and an Amazon Resource Name (ARN) which uniquely identifies user.




Save this info 




How to login with AWS console with newly created account " Ravi "


step 1 : Make a note of the AWS account ID in IAM




login to https://console.aws.amazon.com/console/home





Enter the 12 digit account ID







and enter your user and password





Now you have logged in to AWS console as RAVI and able to access only EC2 services

He can able create , delete , manage the EC2 instance as he is having full permission given from IAM services, however, he cannot access other services like S3 Buckets in AWS 







So this is called user to service communications . In next blogs. we will see, how to access AWS CLI - Command Line Interface from IAM service. Happy Learning 😃

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