Managing user passwords in Amazon

You can manage passwords for your Amazon Web Services account root user and for IAM users in your account. IAM users need passwords in order to access the Amazon Web Services Management Console. Users do not need passwords to access Amazon resources programmatically by using the Amazon CLI, Tools for Windows PowerShell, the Amazon SDKs or APIs. For those environments, you have the option of assigning users access keys. However, there are other more secure alternatives to access keys that we recommend you consider first. For more information, see Considerations and alternatives for long-term access keys in the Amazon General Reference guide.