Authenticate with identities in Amazon IoT SiteWise
Authentication is how you sign in to Amazon using your identity credentials. You must be authenticated as the Amazon Web Services account root user, an IAM user, or by assuming an IAM role.
For programmatic access, Amazon provides an SDK and CLI to cryptographically sign requests. For more information, see Amazon Signature Version 4 for API requests 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 called the Amazon Web Services account root user that has complete access to all Amazon Web Services services and resources. We strongly recommend that you don't use the root user for everyday tasks. For tasks that require root user credentials, see Tasks that require root user credentials in the IAM User Guide.
IAM users and groups
An IAM user is an identity with specific permissions for a single person or application. We recommend using temporary credentials instead of IAM users with long-term credentials. For more information, see Require human users to use federation with an identity provider to access Amazon using temporary credentials in the IAM User Guide.
An IAM group specifies a collection of IAM users and makes permissions easier to manage for large sets of users. For more information, see Use cases for IAM users in the IAM User Guide.
IAM roles
An IAM role is an identity with specific permissions that provides temporary credentials. You can assume a role by switching from a user to an IAM role (console) or by calling an Amazon CLI or Amazon API operation. For more information, see Methods to assume a role in the IAM User Guide.
IAM roles are useful for federated user access, temporary IAM user permissions, cross-account access, cross-service access, and applications running on Amazon EC2. For more information, see Cross account resource access in IAM in the IAM User Guide.