Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Identity and access management for Amazon RDS

Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an Amazon Web Service that helps an administrator securely control access to Amazon resources. IAM administrators control who can be authenticated (signed in) and authorized (have permissions) to use Amazon RDS resources. IAM is an Amazon Web Service that you can use with no additional charge.

Audience

How you use Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) differs, depending on the work you do in Amazon RDS.

Service user – If you use the Amazon RDS service to do your job, then your administrator provides you with the credentials and permissions that you need. As you use more Amazon RDS features to do your work, you might need additional permissions. Understanding how access is managed can help you request the right permissions from your administrator. If you cannot access a feature in Amazon RDS, see Troubleshooting Amazon RDS identity and access.

Service administrator – If you're in charge of Amazon RDS resources at your company, you probably have full access to Amazon RDS. It's your job to determine which Amazon RDS features and resources your employees should access. You must then submit requests to your administrator to change the permissions of your service users. Review the information on this page to understand the basic concepts of IAM. To learn more about how your company can use IAM with Amazon RDS, see How Amazon RDS works with IAM.

Administrator – If you're an administrator, you might want to learn details about how you can write policies to manage access to Amazon RDS. To view example Amazon RDS identity-based policies that you can use in IAM, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon RDS.

Authenticating with identities

Authentication is how you sign in to Amazon using your identity credentials. You must be authenticated (signed in to Amazon) as the Amazon Web Services account root user, as an IAM user, or by assuming an IAM role.

If you access Amazon programmatically, Amazon provides a software development kit (SDK) and a command line interface (CLI) to cryptographically sign your requests by using your credentials. If you don't use Amazon tools, you must sign requests yourself. For more information about using the recommended method to sign requests yourself, see Signing Amazon API requests in the IAM User Guide.

Regardless of the authentication method that you use, you might be required to provide additional security information. For example, Amazon recommends that you use multi-factor authentication (MFA) to increase the security of your account. To learn more, see Using multi-factor authentication (MFA) in Amazon in the IAM User Guide.

Amazon account root user

When you create an Amazon Web Services account, you begin with one sign-in identity that has complete access to all Amazon Web Services and resources in the account. This identity is called the Amazon Web Services account root user and is accessed by signing in with the email address and password that you used to create the account. We strongly recommend that you don't use the root user for your everyday tasks. Safeguard your root user credentials and use them to perform the tasks that only the root user can perform. For the complete list of tasks that require you to sign in as the root user, see Tasks that require root user credentials in the IAM User Guide.

Federated identity

As a best practice, require human users, including users that require administrator access, to use federation with an identity provider to access Amazon Web Services by using temporary credentials.

A federated identity is a user from your enterprise user directory, a web identity provider, the Amazon Directory Service, or any user that accesses Amazon Web Services by using credentials provided through an identity source. When federated identities access Amazon Web Services accounts, they assume roles, and the roles provide temporary credentials.

IAM users and groups

An IAM user is an identity within your Amazon Web Services account that has specific permissions for a single person or application. Where possible, we recommend relying on temporary credentials instead of creating IAM users who have long-term credentials such as passwords and access keys. However, if you have specific use cases that require long-term credentials with IAM users, we recommend that you rotate access keys. For more information, see Rotate access keys regularly for use cases that require long-term credentials in the IAM User Guide.

An IAM group is an identity that specifies a collection of IAM users. You can't sign in as a group. You can use groups to specify permissions for multiple users at a time. Groups make permissions easier to manage for large sets of users. For example, you could have a group named IAMAdmins and give that group permissions to administer IAM resources.

Users are different from roles. A user is uniquely associated with one person or application, but a role is intended to be assumable by anyone who needs it. Users have permanent long-term credentials, but roles provide temporary credentials. To learn more, see When to create an IAM user (instead of a role) in the IAM User Guide.

You can authenticate to your DB instance using IAM database authentication.

IAM database authentication works with the following DB engines:

For more information about authenticating to your DB instance using IAM, see IAM database authentication for MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

IAM roles

An IAM role is an identity within your Amazon Web Services account that has specific permissions. It is similar to a user, but is not associated with a specific person. You can temporarily assume an IAM role in the Amazon Web Services Management Console by switching roles. You can assume a role by calling an Amazon CLI or Amazon API operation or by using a custom URL. For more information about methods for using roles, see Using IAM roles in the IAM User Guide.

IAM roles with temporary credentials are useful in the following situations:

To learn whether to use IAM roles, see When to create an IAM role (instead of a user) in the IAM User Guide.

Managing access using policies

You control access in Amazon by creating policies and attaching them to IAM identities or Amazon resources. A policy is an object in Amazon that, when associated with an identity or resource, defines their permissions. Amazon evaluates these policies when an entity (root user, user, or IAM role) makes a request. Permissions in the policies determine whether the request is allowed or denied. Most policies are stored in Amazon as JSON documents. For more information about the structure and contents of JSON policy documents, see Overview of JSON policies in the IAM User Guide.

An administrator can use policies to specify who has access to Amazon resources, and what actions they can perform on those resources. Every IAM entity (permission set or role) starts with no permissions. In other words, by default, users can do nothing, not even change their own password. To give a user permission to do something, an administrator must attach a permissions policy to a user. Or the administrator can add the user to a group that has the intended permissions. When an administrator gives permissions to a group, all users in that group are granted those permissions.

IAM policies define permissions for an action regardless of the method that you use to perform the operation. For example, suppose that you have a policy that allows the iam:GetRole action. A user with that policy can get role information from the Amazon Web Services Management Console, the Amazon CLI, or the Amazon API.

Identity-based policies

Identity-based policies are JSON permissions policy documents that you can attach to an identity, such as a permission set or role. These policies control what actions that identity can perform, on which resources, and under what conditions. To learn how to create an identity-based policy, see Creating IAM policies in the IAM User Guide.

Identity-based policies can be further categorized as inline policies or managed policies. Inline policies are embedded directly into a single permission set or role. Managed policies are standalone policies that you can attach to multiple permission sets and roles in your Amazon account. Managed policies include Amazon managed policies and customer managed policies. To learn how to choose between a managed policy or an inline policy, see Choosing between managed policies and inline policies in the IAM User Guide.

For information about Amazon managed policies that are specific to Amazon RDS, see Amazon managed policies for Amazon RDS.

Other policy types

Amazon supports additional, less-common policy types. These policy types can set the maximum permissions granted to you by the more common policy types.

Multiple policy types

When multiple types of policies apply to a request, the resulting permissions are more complicated to understand. To learn how Amazon determines whether to allow a request when multiple policy types are involved, see Policy evaluation logic in the IAM User Guide.