AWS services for managing identity and permissions

We previously defined authentication as the process of validating that a claimed identity is that identity, and authorization as the process of authorizing access to a resource, based on a validated identity.

Within AWS, there are several ways to authenticate an identity, and for analytics on AWS, there are two primary ways to manage which identities can access which resources.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service

AWS IAM is a service that provides both authentication and authorization for the AWS Console, command-line interface (CLI), and application programming interface (API) calls.

AWS IAM also supports a federation of identities, meaning that you can configure IAM to use another identity provider for authentication, such as Active Directory or Okta.

Note that this section is not intended as a comprehensive guide to Identity and Access Management on AWS, but it does provide information on foundational...