Identity and access management for Amazon EC2

Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an Amazon Web Services 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 EC2 resources. IAM is an Amazon Web Services service that you can use with no additional charge.

Your security credentials identify you to services in Amazon and grant you access to Amazon resources, such as your Amazon EC2 resources. You can use features of Amazon EC2 and IAM to allow other users, services, and applications to use your Amazon EC2 resources without sharing your security credentials. You can use IAM to control how other users use resources in your Amazon Web Services account, and you can use security groups to control access to your Amazon EC2 instances. You can choose to allow full or limited use of your Amazon EC2 resources.

If you are a developer, you can use IAM roles to manage the security credentials needed by the applications that you run on your EC2 instances. After you attach an IAM role to your instance, your applications running on the instance can retrieve the credentials from the Instance Metadata Service (IMDS).

For best practices for securing your Amazon resources using IAM, see Security best practices in IAM in the IAM User Guide.