97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know

Chapter 33. Identity and Access Management in Cloud Computing

Isuru J. Ranawaka

Senior Full-Stack Cloud Developer

Cloud computing provides a shared network, computing capacity, memory, and storage on demand for a vast set of concurrent consumers. Concurrent access to shared resources has increased security loopholes and threats to the services running on cloud resources. Hence, identity and access management (IAM) is an imperative requirement in cloud computing. A cloud engineer should impose high application-level and network-level security compared to archaic approaches to avoid threats such as phishing attacks, denial-of-service attacks, and man-in-the-middle attacks. This article describes popular IAM patterns used in cloud computing.

Cloud-based clusters are primarily categorized into public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds. Public clouds are offered by third-party providers over the public internet, making them available to any interested parties. Private clouds are isolated from public clouds and are operated on more secure private networks. Hybrid clouds combine private and public clouds. Furthermore, cloud-based clusters are exposed through different models, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and serverless.

Nowadays, a wide variety of free and commercial applications use IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and ...