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Security & IAM
AWS Identity and Access Management
AWS Identity and Access Management defines identities, roles, policies, permissions boundaries, trust relationships, and service-control integration for authenticated access to AWS APIs and resources.
Explore pricing models, common use cases, infrastructure support, and the AWS services that commonly work with AWS Identity and Access Management.
AWS Identity and Access Management pricing and cost programs
Pricing model: No additional service charge
- On-Demand
- Not applicable
- Reserved Instances or reserved capacity
- Not applicable
- Savings Plans
- Not applicable
- Spot
- Not applicable
Billing dimensions: Related AWS services · Optional external identity products
Programs and modes: IAM users, roles, and policies
AWS IAM has no additional charge; this official FAQ is the pricing source.
Free Tier: Not applicable — verify current offers
Pricing reviewed 2026-07-25. Reviewed against the linked official AWS pricing page. Recheck regional rates and program terms before purchase.
Official AWS pricing
Official AWS sources reviewed 2026-07-21.
Why implement AWS Identity and Access Management?
- Provides the policy and role system used to authenticate and authorize people, workloads, and AWS services across an account.
- Enables temporary credentials, federation, resource policies, permissions boundaries, session policies, and condition-based access instead of shared static keys.
- Integrates with IAM Access Analyzer and CloudTrail for policy validation, external-access analysis, unused-access review, and evidence-driven least privilege.
How to implement AWS Identity and Access Management
- Use IAM Identity Center and an external or built-in identity source for workforce access, and IAM roles with temporary credentials for AWS and external workloads.
- Define actions, resources, principals, trust policy, and conditions from an explicit task model; add permissions boundaries and organization SCPs where delegation or guardrails require them.
- Validate policies with IAM Access Analyzer, test allowed and denied paths, deploy through infrastructure as code, monitor CloudTrail, and remove unused permissions and credentials continuously.
AWS Identity and Access Management best practices
- Lock down the root user, enable phishing-resistant MFA, avoid root access keys, and use root only for documented tasks that cannot be delegated.
- Prefer federated human roles and workload roles with short-lived credentials over IAM users and long-lived access keys; never share identities.
- Start from least privilege, restrict wildcard actions and resources with conditions, validate policies, analyze public and cross-account access, and regularly revoke unused access.
AWS Identity and Access Management use cases and server impact
- Workload roles and service permissions
- Cross-account access
- Delegated administration with guardrails
Replaces local AWS credential stores and much custom API authorization for AWS resources, but identity lifecycle, policy design, review, and application-level authorization remain customer work.
Official implementation resources
How AWS Identity and Access Management works with other AWS services
Arrows show the documented technical direction. Reciprocal navigation does not imply a reverse technical dependency.
Official AWS sources reviewed 2026-07-25.
AWS Identity and Access Management → AWS Lambda
A Lambda execution role supplies temporary credentials that the function uses when it calls AWS APIs.
- Why teams use it
- Workload roles avoid long-lived embedded access keys and make permissions auditable.
- Permissions and networking
- Grant only required actions and resources, separate deployment from runtime roles, and use resource policies for inbound invocation where supported.
- Pricing and security caveats
- IAM itself has no additional charge, but authorized service calls do. An execution role controls Lambda outbound access, not who may invoke the function.
AWS Identity and Access Management → Amazon Elastic Container Service
ECS task execution roles let the ECS agent perform launch-time actions, while task roles provide AWS credentials to application containers.
- Why teams use it
- Separating platform and application permissions limits credential scope per workload.
- Permissions and networking
- Do not collapse execution and task permissions into one broad role; constrain trust policies and protect task-role credentials from neighboring workloads.
- Pricing and security caveats
- IAM has no additional charge, but every authorized downstream service operation can incur cost. Roles do not provide network isolation.
AWS Identity and Access Management → Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
EKS workloads can use IAM roles associated with Kubernetes service accounts or pod identities to receive scoped AWS credentials.
- Why teams use it
- The pairing avoids node-wide credentials and maps application identity to specific cloud permissions.
- Permissions and networking
- Bind roles to the intended cluster, namespace, and service account, restrict role trust, and keep Kubernetes RBAC separate from AWS API authorization.
- Pricing and security caveats
- IAM and Kubernetes authorization are independent layers; a permissive policy can expose resources even when cluster RBAC is strict.
AWS Identity and Access Management → AWS CloudTrail
CloudTrail records supported IAM and AWS STS API activity with caller identity and request context.
- Why teams use it
- Teams use those events to investigate permission changes, role assumptions, and access-key activity.
- Permissions and networking
- Create organization-wide trails where appropriate, protect logs from modification, and alert on high-risk identity changes without logging secrets elsewhere.
- Pricing and security caveats
- CloudTrail records activity after authorization decisions; it does not enforce IAM policy. Data-event and Insights coverage can add cost.
Planning guides that use AWS Identity and Access Management