Introduction to Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is another web service from Amazon that allows you to control access to aws resources.

Through it you can easily control who will access what resource without sharing your password or access key. You can grant different permissions to different people.

All you need to do is just create different user or group of users and grant them permission. To make you understand more clearly about how you can create user, I am giving a step by step process below:

Step 1: After login, on left side top corner click on Services and choose IAM in Security, Identify & Compliance category.

Step 2: This will lead you to IAM dashboard. First you will create user because you will give permission to some user or a group of users. Now here click on Users in left side menu.

Step 3: At Users page, click on Add user button to add user. You can see a small form divided in two fields; first is Set User details in which you need to give user name and you can add multiple users here to give same permission. Here I am giving username “firstuser”.
Second is Select AWS Access type in which you need to select access type for those users you just added above. Here I select “Programmatic Access”.

Next: Permission

Step 4: Now you need to Set Permission for firstuser (Username). Here we have three options: Add user to group, Copying permissions from existing user, and Attach existing policies directly. You are creating user first time so you will add users to group so click on Create group button.
A small form displays to create group, Give group name, here I am giving “Developers" and select the policy type you want to attach to the group. Select “AmazonEC2FullAccess”, you can select other policies too based on your requirement.

So user has been added to the “Developers” group.

Next: Review

Step 5: Please Review all the details here and if needed, edit them.

Create user

Step 6: You successfully created user now you can see Access Key and Secret Access Key. Either copy & paste them at appropriate place where from you can access them easily because your user will login with these credentials or you can download them directly by click on Download.csv button.