[AWS]AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Day1

Understand the difference between a region, an Availability Zone(AZ) and an Edge Location.

• A Region is a physical location in the world which consists of two or more Availability Zones (AZ's).

• An AZ is one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking and connectivity, housed in separate facilities.

• Edge Locations are endpoints for AWS which are used for caching content. Typically this consists of CloudFront, Amazon's Content Delivery Network (CDN)

IAM(Identity Access Management) 101

What is IAM?

• IAM allows you to manage users and their level of access to the AWS Console.

IAM offers the following features;

• Centralized control of your AWS account

• Shared Access to your AWS account

• Granular Permissions

• Identity Federation (including Active Directory, Facebook, Linkedin etc)

• Multifactor Authentication

• Provide temporary access for users/deivces and services where necessary

• Allows you to set up your own password rotation policy

• Integrates with many different AWS services

• Suports PCI DSS Compliance

Key Term for IAM

• Users : End Users such as people, employees of an organization etc.

• Groups : A collection of users. Each user in the group will inherit the permissions of the group.

• Policies : Policies are made up of documents, called Policy documents. These documents are in a format called JSON and they give permissions as to what a User/Group/Role is able to do.

• Roles : You create roles and then assign them to AWS Resources.

Identity Access Management - LAB

What have we learnt so far?

• IAM is universal. It does not apply to regions at this time.

• The 'root account' is simply the account created when first setup your AWS account. It has complete Admin access.

• New Users have NO permissions when first created.

• New Users are assigned Access Key ID & Secret Access Keys when first created.

• These are not the same as a password. You cannot use the Access key ID & Secret Key to Login in to the console. You can use this to access AWS via the APIs and Commnad Line, however.

• You only get to view these once. If you lose them, you have to regenerate them. So, save them in a secure location.

• Always setup Multifactor Authentication on your root account.

• You can create and customise your own password rotation policies.