How Amazon Cost Management works with IAM - Amazon Cost Management
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How Amazon Cost Management works with IAM

Amazon Cost Management integrates with the Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) service so that you can control who in your organization has access to specific pages on the Amazon Cost Management console. You can control access to invoices and detailed information about charges and account activity, budgets, payment methods, and credits.

For more information about how to activate access to the Billing and Cost Management Console, see Tutorial: Delegate Access to the Billing Console in the IAM User Guide.

Before you use IAM to manage access to Amazon Cost Management, learn what IAM features are available to use with Amazon Cost Management.

IAM features you can use with Amazon Cost Management
IAM feature Amazon Cost Management support

Identity-based policies

Yes

Resource-based policies

No

Policy actions

Yes

Policy resources

Partial

Policy condition keys

Yes

ACLs

No

ABAC (tags in policies)

Partial

Temporary credentials

Yes

Forward access sessions (FAS)

Yes

Service roles

Yes

Service-linked roles

No

To get a high-level view of how Amazon Cost Management and other Amazon services work with most IAM features, see Amazon services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Identity-based policies for Amazon Cost Management

Supports identity-based policies: Yes

Identity-based policies are JSON permissions policy documents that you can attach to an identity, such as an IAM user, group of users, or role. These policies control what actions users and roles can perform, on which resources, and under what conditions. To learn how to create an identity-based policy, see Define custom IAM permissions with customer managed policies in the IAM User Guide.

With IAM identity-based policies, you can specify allowed or denied actions and resources as well as the conditions under which actions are allowed or denied. You can't specify the principal in an identity-based policy because it applies to the user or role to which it is attached. To learn about all of the elements that you can use in a JSON policy, see IAM JSON policy elements reference in the IAM User Guide.

Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Cost Management

To view examples of Amazon Cost Management identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Cost Management.

Resource-based policies within Amazon Cost Management

Supports resource-based policies: No

Resource-based policies are JSON policy documents that you attach to a resource. Examples of resource-based policies are IAM role trust policies and Amazon S3 bucket policies. In services that support resource-based policies, service administrators can use them to control access to a specific resource. For the resource where the policy is attached, the policy defines what actions a specified principal can perform on that resource and under what conditions. You must specify a principal in a resource-based policy. Principals can include accounts, users, roles, federated users, or Amazon Web Services services.

To enable cross-account access, you can specify an entire account or IAM entities in another account as the principal in a resource-based policy. Adding a cross-account principal to a resource-based policy is only half of establishing the trust relationship. When the principal and the resource are in different Amazon Web Services accounts, an IAM administrator in the trusted account must also grant the principal entity (user or role) permission to access the resource. They grant permission by attaching an identity-based policy to the entity. However, if a resource-based policy grants access to a principal in the same account, no additional identity-based policy is required. For more information, see Cross account resource access in IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Policy actions for Amazon Cost Management

Supports policy actions: Yes

Administrators can use Amazon JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Action element of a JSON policy describes the actions that you can use to allow or deny access in a policy. Policy actions usually have the same name as the associated Amazon API operation. There are some exceptions, such as permission-only actions that don't have a matching API operation. There are also some operations that require multiple actions in a policy. These additional actions are called dependent actions.

Include actions in a policy to grant permissions to perform the associated operation.

To see a list of Amazon Cost Management actions, see Actions defined by Amazon Cost Management in the Service Authorization Reference.

Policy actions in Amazon Cost Management use the following prefix before the action:

ce

To specify multiple actions in a single statement, separate them with commas.

"Action": [ "ce:action1", "ce:action2" ]

To view examples of Amazon Cost Management identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Cost Management.

Policy resources for Amazon Cost Management

Supports policy resources: Partial

Policy resources are only supported for monitors, subscriptions, and cost categories.

Administrators can use Amazon JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Resource JSON policy element specifies the object or objects to which the action applies. Statements must include either a Resource or a NotResource element. As a best practice, specify a resource using its Amazon Resource Name (ARN). You can do this for actions that support a specific resource type, known as resource-level permissions.

For actions that don't support resource-level permissions, such as listing operations, use a wildcard (*) to indicate that the statement applies to all resources.

"Resource": "*"

To see a list of Amazon Cost Explorer resource types, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon Cost Explorer in the Service Authorization Reference.

To view examples of Amazon Cost Management identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Cost Management.

Policy condition keys for Amazon Cost Management

Supports service-specific policy condition keys: Yes

Administrators can use Amazon JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Condition element (or Condition block) lets you specify conditions in which a statement is in effect. The Condition element is optional. You can create conditional expressions that use condition operators, such as equals or less than, to match the condition in the policy with values in the request.

If you specify multiple Condition elements in a statement, or multiple keys in a single Condition element, Amazon evaluates them using a logical AND operation. If you specify multiple values for a single condition key, Amazon evaluates the condition using a logical OR operation. All of the conditions must be met before the statement's permissions are granted.

You can also use placeholder variables when you specify conditions. For example, you can grant an IAM user permission to access a resource only if it is tagged with their IAM user name. For more information, see IAM policy elements: variables and tags in the IAM User Guide.

Amazon supports global condition keys and service-specific condition keys. To see all Amazon global condition keys, see Amazon global condition context keys in the IAM User Guide.

To see a list of Amazon Cost Management condition keys, actions, and resources, see Condition keys for Amazon Cost Management in the Service Authorization Reference.

To view examples of Amazon Cost Management identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Cost Management.

Access control lists (ACLs) in Amazon Cost Management

Supports ACLs: No

Access control lists (ACLs) control which principals (account members, users, or roles) have permissions to access a resource. ACLs are similar to resource-based policies, although they do not use the JSON policy document format.

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) with Amazon Cost Management

Supports ABAC (tags in policies): Partial

ABAC (tags in policies) are only supported for monitors, subscriptions, and cost categories.

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is an authorization strategy that defines permissions based on attributes. In Amazon, these attributes are called tags. You can attach tags to IAM entities (users or roles) and to many Amazon resources. Tagging entities and resources is the first step of ABAC. Then you design ABAC policies to allow operations when the principal's tag matches the tag on the resource that they are trying to access.

ABAC is helpful in environments that are growing rapidly and helps with situations where policy management becomes cumbersome.

To control access based on tags, you provide tag information in the condition element of a policy using the aws:ResourceTag/key-name, aws:RequestTag/key-name, or aws:TagKeys condition keys.

If a service supports all three condition keys for every resource type, then the value is Yes for the service. If a service supports all three condition keys for only some resource types, then the value is Partial.

For more information about ABAC, see Define permissions with ABAC authorization in the IAM User Guide. To view a tutorial with steps for setting up ABAC, see Use attribute-based access control (ABAC) in the IAM User Guide.

Using Temporary credentials with Amazon Cost Management

Supports temporary credentials: Yes

Some Amazon Web Services services don't work when you sign in using temporary credentials. For additional information, including which Amazon Web Services services work with temporary credentials, see Amazon Web Services services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

You are using temporary credentials if you sign in to the Amazon Web Services Management Console using any method except a user name and password. For example, when you access Amazon using your company's single sign-on (SSO) link, that process automatically creates temporary credentials. You also automatically create temporary credentials when you sign in to the console as a user and then switch roles. For more information about switching roles, see Switch from a user to an IAM role (console) in the IAM User Guide.

You can manually create temporary credentials using the Amazon CLI or Amazon API. You can then use those temporary credentials to access Amazon. Amazon recommends that you dynamically generate temporary credentials instead of using long-term access keys. For more information, see Temporary security credentials in IAM.

Forward access sessions for Amazon Cost Management

Supports forward access sessions (FAS): Yes

When you use an IAM user or role to perform actions in Amazon, you are considered a principal. When you use some services, you might perform an action that then initiates another action in a different service. FAS uses the permissions of the principal calling an Amazon Web Services service, combined with the requesting Amazon Web Services service to make requests to downstream services. FAS requests are only made when a service receives a request that requires interactions with other Amazon Web Services services or resources to complete. In this case, you must have permissions to perform both actions. For policy details when making FAS requests, see Forward access sessions.

Service roles for Amazon Cost Management

Supports service roles: Yes

A service role is an IAM role that a service assumes to perform actions on your behalf. An IAM administrator can create, modify, and delete a service role from within IAM. For more information, see Create a role to delegate permissions to an Amazon Web Services service in the IAM User Guide.

Warning

Changing the permissions for a service role might break Amazon Cost Management functionality. Edit service roles only when Amazon Cost Management provides guidance to do so.