Manage Amazon Web Services accounts with permission sets

A permission set is a template that you create and maintain that defines a collection of one or more IAM policies. Permission sets simplify the assignment of Amazon Web Services account access for users and groups in your organization. For example, you can create a Database Admin permission set that includes policies for administering Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, and Aurora services, and use that single permission set to grant access to a list of target Amazon Web Services accounts within your Amazon Organization for your database administrators.

IAM Identity Center assigns access to a user or group in one or more Amazon Web Services accounts with permission sets. When you assign a permission set, IAM Identity Center creates corresponding IAM Identity Center-controlled IAM roles in each account, and attaches the policies specified in the permission set to those roles. IAM Identity Center manages the role, and allows the authorized users you’ve defined to assume the role, by using the IAM Identity Center User Portal or Amazon CLI.  As you modify the permission set, IAM Identity Center ensures that the corresponding IAM policies and roles are updated accordingly.

You can add Amazon managed policies, customer managed policies, inline policies, and Amazon managed policies for job functions to your permission sets. You can also assign an Amazon managed policy or a customer managed policy as a permissions boundary.

To create a permission set, see Create, manage, and delete permission sets.

Create a permission set that applies least-privilege permissions

To follow the best practice of applying least-privilege permissions, after you create an administrative permission set, you create a more restrictive permission set and assign it to one or more users. The permission sets created in the previous procedure provide a starting point for you to assess the amount of access to resources your users need. To switch to least privilege permissions, you can run IAM Access Analyzer to monitor principals with Amazon managed policies. After learning which permissions they're using, then you can write a custom policy or generate a policy with only the required permissions for your team.

With IAM Identity Center, you can assign multiple permission sets to the same user. Your administrative user should also be assigned additional, more restrictive, permission sets. That way, they can access your Amazon Web Services account with only the permissions that required, rather than always using their administrative permissions.

For example, if you're a developer, after you create your administrative user in IAM Identity Center, you can create a new permission set that grants PowerUserAccess permissions, and then assign that permission set to yourself. Unlike the administrative permission set, which uses AdministratorAccess permissions, the PowerUserAccess permission set doesn't allow management of IAM users and groups. When you sign into the Amazon access portal to access your Amazon account, you can choose PowerUserAccess rather than the AdministratorAccess to perform development tasks in the account.

Keep the following considerations in mind: