Implementing Identity Management on AWS

Preface

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest cloud platform in the world. It was also the first modern cloud services provider and the first to achieve broad enterprise penetration. Whereas being the successful first mover in a market has its advantages, it can also limit a service’s flexibility. Compared to its biggest peers, which logically extend enterprise identity architectures (in part because they came to market years later), AWS’ IAM capabilities can appear slightly alien. Like an archaeologist examining a dig site, we can see artifacts that suggest the service had a history of differing access mechanisms and strategies over the years. Given the success of the service, perhaps it was deemed too great a risk to the growing user base ...