Identity and access management for Amazon Glue - Amazon Glue
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Identity and access management for Amazon Glue

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 Glue resources. IAM is an Amazon Web Services service that you can use with no additional charge.

Note

You can grant access to your data in the Amazon Glue Data Catalog using either Amazon Glue methods or Amazon Lake Formation grants. You can use Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to set fine-grained access control with Amazon Glue methods. Lake Formation uses a simpler GRANT/REVOKE permissions model that is similar to the GRANT/REVOKE commands in a relational database system.

This section includes information about how to use the Amazon Glue methods. For information about using Lake Formation grants, see Granting Lake Formation permissions in the Amazon Lake Formation Developer Guide.

Audience

How you use Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) differs, depending on the work that you do in Amazon Glue.

Service user – If you use the Amazon Glue service to do your job, then your administrator provides you with the credentials and permissions that you need. As you use more Amazon Glue features to do your work, you might need additional permissions. Understanding how access is managed can help you request the right permissions from your administrator. If you cannot access a feature in Amazon Glue, see Troubleshooting Amazon Glue identity and access.

Service administrator – If you're in charge of Amazon Glue resources at your company, you probably have full access to Amazon Glue. It's your job to determine which Amazon Glue features and resources your service users should access. You must then submit requests to your IAM administrator to change the permissions of your service users. Review the information on this page to understand the basic concepts of IAM. To learn more about how your company can use IAM with Amazon Glue, see How Amazon Glue works with IAM.

IAM administrator – If you're an IAM administrator, you might want to learn details about how you can write policies to manage access to Amazon Glue. To view example Amazon Glue identity-based policies that you can use in IAM, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Glue.

Authenticating with identities

Authentication is how you sign in to Amazon using your identity credentials. You must be authenticated (signed in to Amazon) as the Amazon Web Services account root user, as an IAM user, or by assuming an IAM role.

If you access Amazon programmatically, Amazon provides a software development kit (SDK) and a command line interface (CLI) to cryptographically sign your requests by using your credentials. If you don't use Amazon tools, you must sign requests yourself. For more information about using the recommended method to sign requests yourself, see Amazon Signature Version 4 for API requests in the IAM User Guide.

Regardless of the authentication method that you use, you might be required to provide additional security information. For example, Amazon recommends that you use multi-factor authentication (MFA) to increase the security of your account. To learn more, see Amazon Multi-factor authentication in IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Amazon Web Services account root user

When you create an Amazon Web Services account, you begin with one sign-in identity that has complete access to all Amazon Web Services services and resources in the account. This identity is called the Amazon Web Services account root user and is accessed by signing in with the email address and password that you used to create the account. We strongly recommend that you don't use the root user for your everyday tasks. Safeguard your root user credentials and use them to perform the tasks that only the root user can perform. For the complete list of tasks that require you to sign in as the root user, see Tasks that require root user credentials in the IAM User Guide.

Federated identity

As a best practice, require human users, including users that require administrator access, to use federation with an identity provider to access Amazon Web Services services by using temporary credentials.

A federated identity is a user from your enterprise user directory, a web identity provider, the Amazon Directory Service, or any user that accesses Amazon Web Services services by using credentials provided through an identity source. When federated identities access Amazon Web Services accounts, they assume roles, and the roles provide temporary credentials.

IAM users and groups

An IAM user is an identity within your Amazon Web Services account that has specific permissions for a single person or application. Where possible, we recommend relying on temporary credentials instead of creating IAM users who have long-term credentials such as passwords and access keys. However, if you have specific use cases that require long-term credentials with IAM users, we recommend that you rotate access keys. For more information, see Rotate access keys regularly for use cases that require long-term credentials in the IAM User Guide.

An IAM group is an identity that specifies a collection of IAM users. You can't sign in as a group. You can use groups to specify permissions for multiple users at a time. Groups make permissions easier to manage for large sets of users. For example, you could have a group named IAMAdmins and give that group permissions to administer IAM resources.

Users are different from roles. A user is uniquely associated with one person or application, but a role is intended to be assumable by anyone who needs it. Users have permanent long-term credentials, but roles provide temporary credentials. To learn more, see Use cases for IAM users in the IAM User Guide.

IAM roles

An IAM role is an identity within your Amazon Web Services account that has specific permissions. It is similar to an IAM user, but is not associated with a specific person. To temporarily assume an IAM role in the Amazon Web Services Management Console, you can switch from a user to an IAM role (console). You can assume a role by calling an Amazon CLI or Amazon API operation or by using a custom URL. For more information about methods for using roles, see Methods to assume a role in the IAM User Guide.

IAM roles with temporary credentials are useful in the following situations:

  • Federated user access – To assign permissions to a federated identity, you create a role and define permissions for the role. When a federated identity authenticates, the identity is associated with the role and is granted the permissions that are defined by the role. For information about roles for federation, see Create a role for a third-party identity provider (federation) in the IAM User Guide.

  • Temporary IAM user permissions – An IAM user or role can assume an IAM role to temporarily take on different permissions for a specific task.

  • Cross-account access – You can use an IAM role to allow someone (a trusted principal) in a different account to access resources in your account. Roles are the primary way to grant cross-account access. However, with some Amazon Web Services services, you can attach a policy directly to a resource (instead of using a role as a proxy). To learn the difference between roles and resource-based policies for cross-account access, see Cross account resource access in IAM in the IAM User Guide.

  • Cross-service access – Some Amazon Web Services services use features in other Amazon Web Services services. For example, when you make a call in a service, it's common for that service to run applications in Amazon EC2 or store objects in Amazon S3. A service might do this using the calling principal's permissions, using a service role, or using a service-linked role.

    • Forward access sessions (FAS) – 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 role – 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.

    • Service-linked role – A service-linked role is a type of service role that is linked to an Amazon Web Services service. The service can assume the role to perform an action on your behalf. Service-linked roles appear in your Amazon Web Services account and are owned by the service. An IAM administrator can view, but not edit the permissions for service-linked roles.

  • Applications running on Amazon EC2 – You can use an IAM role to manage temporary credentials for applications that are running on an EC2 instance and making Amazon CLI or Amazon API requests. This is preferable to storing access keys within the EC2 instance. To assign an Amazon role to an EC2 instance and make it available to all of its applications, you create an instance profile that is attached to the instance. An instance profile contains the role and enables programs that are running on the EC2 instance to get temporary credentials. For more information, see Use an IAM role to grant permissions to applications running on Amazon EC2 instances in the IAM User Guide.

Managing access using policies

You control access in Amazon by creating policies and attaching them to Amazon identities or resources. A policy is an object in Amazon that, when associated with an identity or resource, defines their permissions. Amazon evaluates these policies when a principal (user, root user, or role session) makes a request. Permissions in the policies determine whether the request is allowed or denied. Most policies are stored in Amazon as JSON documents. For more information about the structure and contents of JSON policy documents, see Overview of JSON policies in the IAM User Guide.

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.

By default, users and roles have no permissions. To grant users permission to perform actions on the resources that they need, an IAM administrator can create IAM policies. The administrator can then add the IAM policies to roles, and users can assume the roles.

IAM policies define permissions for an action regardless of the method that you use to perform the operation. For example, suppose that you have a policy that allows the iam:GetRole action. A user with that policy can get role information from the Amazon Web Services Management Console, the Amazon CLI, or the Amazon API.

Identity-based policies

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.

Identity-based policies can be further categorized as inline policies or managed policies. Inline policies are embedded directly into a single user, group, or role. Managed policies are standalone policies that you can attach to multiple users, groups, and roles in your Amazon Web Services account. Managed policies include Amazon managed policies and customer managed policies. To learn how to choose between a managed policy or an inline policy, see Choose between managed policies and inline policies in the IAM User Guide.

Resource-based policies

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.

Resource-based policies are inline policies that are located in that service. You can't use Amazon managed policies from IAM in a resource-based policy.

Access control lists (ACLs)

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.

Amazon S3, Amazon WAF, and Amazon VPC are examples of services that support ACLs. To learn more about ACLs, see Access control list (ACL) overview in the Amazon Simple Storage Service Developer Guide.

Other policy types

Amazon supports additional, less-common policy types. These policy types can set the maximum permissions granted to you by the more common policy types.

  • Permissions boundaries – A permissions boundary is an advanced feature in which you set the maximum permissions that an identity-based policy can grant to an IAM entity (IAM user or role). You can set a permissions boundary for an entity. The resulting permissions are the intersection of an entity's identity-based policies and its permissions boundaries. Resource-based policies that specify the user or role in the Principal field are not limited by the permissions boundary. An explicit deny in any of these policies overrides the allow. For more information about permissions boundaries, see Permissions boundaries for IAM entities in the IAM User Guide.

  • Service control policies (SCPs) – SCPs are JSON policies that specify the maximum permissions for an organization or organizational unit (OU) in Amazon Organizations. Amazon Organizations is a service for grouping and centrally managing multiple Amazon Web Services accounts that your business owns. If you enable all features in an organization, then you can apply service control policies (SCPs) to any or all of your accounts. The SCP limits permissions for entities in member accounts, including each Amazon Web Services account root user. For more information about Organizations and SCPs, see Service control policies in the Amazon Organizations User Guide.

  • Resource control policies (RCPs) – RCPs are JSON policies that you can use to set the maximum available permissions for resources in your accounts without updating the IAM policies attached to each resource that you own. The RCP limits permissions for resources in member accounts and can impact the effective permissions for identities, including the Amazon Web Services account root user, regardless of whether they belong to your organization. For more information about Organizations and RCPs, including a list of Amazon Web Services services that support RCPs, see Resource control policies (RCPs) in the Amazon Organizations User Guide.

  • Session policies – Session policies are advanced policies that you pass as a parameter when you programmatically create a temporary session for a role or federated user. The resulting session's permissions are the intersection of the user or role's identity-based policies and the session policies. Permissions can also come from a resource-based policy. An explicit deny in any of these policies overrides the allow. For more information, see Session policies in the IAM User Guide.

Multiple policy types

When multiple types of policies apply to a request, the resulting permissions are more complicated to understand. To learn how Amazon determines whether to allow a request when multiple policy types are involved, see Policy evaluation logic in the IAM User Guide.