Manage users and groups in Amazon Managed Microsoft AD

Users represent individual people or entities that have access to your directory. Groups are very useful for giving or denying privileges to groups of users, rather than having to apply those privileges to each individual user. If a user moves to a different organization, you move that user to a different group and they automatically receive the privileges needed for the new organization.

To create users and groups in an Amazon Directory Service directory, you must use any instance (from either on-premises or EC2) that has been joined to your Amazon Directory Service directory, and be logged in as a user that has privileges to create users and groups. You will also need to install the Active Directory Tools on your EC2 instance so you can add your users and groups with the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in.

You can deploy a pre-configured EC2 instance with preinstalled Active Directory administrative tools from Amazon Directory Service management console. For more information, see Launch directory administration instance in your Amazon Managed Microsoft AD Active Directory.

If you need to deploy a self-managed EC2 instance with administrative tools and install the necessary tools, see Step 3: Deploy an Amazon EC2 instance to manage your Amazon Managed Microsoft AD Active Directory.

The following topics include instructions on how to create and manage users and groups.