Creating Amazon Identity and Access Management resources with Amazon CloudFormation
Amazon Identity and Access Management is integrated with Amazon CloudFormation, a service that helps you to model and set up your Amazon resources so that you can spend less time creating and managing your resources and infrastructure. You create a template that describes all the Amazon resources that you want (such as access keys, groups, group policies, instance profiles, managed policies, OIDC providers, inline policies, roles, role policies, SAML providers, server certificates, service-linked roles, users (and adding users to groups), user policies, and virtual MFA devices), and Amazon CloudFormation provisions and configures those resources for you.
When you use Amazon CloudFormation, you can reuse your template to set up your IAM resources consistently and repeatedly. Describe your resources once, and then provision the same resources over and over in multiple Amazon Web Services accounts and Regions.
IAM and Amazon CloudFormation templates
To provision and configure resources for IAM and related services, you must understand Amazon CloudFormation templates. Templates are formatted text files in JSON or YAML. These templates describe the resources that you want to provision in your Amazon CloudFormation stacks. If you're unfamiliar with JSON or YAML, you can use Amazon CloudFormation Designer to help you get started with Amazon CloudFormation templates. For more information, see What is Amazon CloudFormation Designer? in the Amazon CloudFormation User Guide.
IAM supports creating access keys, groups, group policies, instance profiles, managed policies, OIDC providers, inline policies, roles, role policies, SAML providers, server certificates, service-linked roles, users (and adding users to groups), user policies, and virtual MFA devices in Amazon CloudFormation. For more information, including examples of JSON and YAML templates for IAM resources, see the Amazon Identity and Access Management resource type reference in the Amazon CloudFormation User Guide.
You can also create templates that create related resources, such as roles and managed policies.
Learn more about Amazon CloudFormation
To learn more about Amazon CloudFormation, see the following resources: