Effective DevOps with AWS

Configuring a user password policy

AWS supports the enforcement of password policies. We can ask for example passwords to be at least 16 characters long and include numbers, symbols, lowercase, and capital letters. We will create one using the AWS CLI.

The easiest way to create (or update) such a policy is to use the --generate-cli-skeleton option to generate the JSON template for the parameters that the policy takes. We will run the command and redirect its output to a file called password-policy as follows:

$ aws iam update-account-password-policy \
      --generate-cli-skeleton > password-policy  

We can now edit the file, which at first looks like this:

{
    "MinimumPasswordLength": 0,
    "RequireSymbols": true,
    "RequireNumbers": true,
    "RequireUppercaseCharacters": ...