Amazon IAM (Identity and Access Management) enables you to manage users and user permissions in AWS. You can create one or more IAM users in your AWS account. You might create an IAM user for someone who needs access to your AWS console, or when you have a new application that needs to make API calls to AWS. This is to add an extra layer of security to your AWS account.

In this chapter, we are going to create a new IAM user for a couple of the AWS related tools we are going to be using later.

Create User

First, log in to your AWS Console and select IAM from the list of services.

Select IAM Service Screenshot

Select Users.

Select IAM Users Screenshot

Select Add User.

Add IAM User Screenshot

Enter a User name and check Programmatic access, then select Next: Permissions.

This account will be used by our AWS CLI and Serverless Framework. They’ll be connecting to the AWS API directly and will not be using the Management Console.

Fill in IAM User Info Screenshot

Select Attach existing policies directly.

Add IAM User Policy Screenshot

Search for AdministratorAccess and select the policy, then select Next: Review.

We can provide a more finely grained policy but this will do for now.

Added Admin Policy Screenshot

Select Create user.

Reivew IAM User Screenshot

Select Show to reveal Secret access key.

Added IAM User Screenshot

Take a note of the Access key ID and Secret access key. We will be needing this later.

IAM User Credentials Screenshot

The concept of IAM pops up very frequently when working with AWS services. So it is worth taking a better look at what IAM is and how it can help us secure our serverless setup.