IAM in Real-World Architectures
In production, IAM design affects scalability and security posture.
Key architectural patterns:
Service Roles
Every service should use a role:
- EC2 instance profile
- Lambda execution role
- ECS task role
This enables secure service-to-service communication.
Separation of Duties
Different roles for:
- Developers
- Operations
- Security
- CI/CD pipelines
Avoid shared admin accounts.
Multi-Account Strategy
In larger organizations:
- Use separate AWS accounts for dev, staging, prod.
- Use IAM roles for cross-account access.
- This reduces blast radius.
Federation
Instead of creating IAM users for every employee:
- Use identity federation (SSO).
- Centralize identity management.
Production insight: Most breaches happen due to excessive permissions or exposed credentials. Proper IAM architecture mitigates both.
In this section, I learned:
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