Summary

Over the course of this chapter, we've learned the basics of IAM and seen it applied to a typical enterprise worker scenario. We also learned about the AWS IAM service, and how it applies IAM to AWS itself. Additionally, we learned about the types of objects managed by the AWS IAM service and got a high-level overview of how AWS IAM uses authentication, authorization, and request context to evaluate every request that comes into an AWS account. Finally, we took a tour of the IAM dashboard inside of the AWS Management Console and created our first non-root administrative user.

The next chapter will introduce us to an alternate method for interacting with our AWS account – the AWS CLI. We will learn how to install and configure it on Windows and macOS/Linux, including setting up different profiles for different use cases. We'll also examine the command syntax and get introduced to some tools that will help us discover command syntax and administrate objects. By the end of the chapter, we will have learned how to make programmatic calls to an AWS account.