Hahahaha. No, fundamentally it is one input into a huge mess that you cannot actually see or audit from a 10k foot level.
AWS has produced a long, rambling and imprecise description of (some of?) what’s actually going on. You can read it here:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_poli...
Some of what they’re describing doesn’t even live within the IAM umbrella as far as I can tell. I’m not convinced that a concise, formal and unambiguous specification exists anywhere, even within AWSes own development teams.
I’ve asked LLMs to write AWS “policy”. They get the grammar mostly right. They cannot explain what the effects are in a manner that they will stand by after they search the web for documentation. Since I have never found good documentation despite looking, I can’t personally do any better than the LLMs. I’d love to be pointed at real documentation or specs.
I don't work for IAM but I worked for several other teams over the years and IAM is actually one of the least confusing services. But I am definitely biased and have more than average amount of experience on this particular subject. I still think the general idea is more sane than Azure Account for example. I do think this reflect on the philosophical level where whether cloud are building blocks or are they consulting projects. I personally think IAM is done right in that regard.
I know they’re all checked. What don’t know is how the results of those checks are combined to get the final result. As far as I can tell, the result is not something like OR or AND — it seems like it’s something exceedingly complex and that the output of the policy part may be more complex than just a Boolean value.
Maybe the underlying implementation is fantastic (and my distinct impression is that AWS takes this stuff far more seriously than Azure), but that doesn’t mean that the docs are easy to find or that the system actually makes sense in anything other than an agglomeration-of-backwards-compatible-layers sense.
I mean something like actions: s3:cp Resource: bucketarn/key
Most of the time, actions are self explanatory and good enough, but i recently gave a developer permission to scale an asg, and it required a lot of unguessable actions, if i were to give "actions: scale" (forgot the correct cli parameter for it), it would make more clean env
That’s why it’s so complicated!!!
I don’t understand how I should evaluate trust for your internal EBS org versus your internal ALB org.
I kinda just expect it to be all “AWS” trust.
And it’s all garbage anyway. There’s no way I can prevent the hypothetically untrustworthy EBS team from surreptitiously adding charges to my account if they want to. Right? This would maybe make some sense if I could top level turn off/on services, but that isn’t how it works.
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I have no doubt this makes some sense from someone inside the machine, but from the outside it’s not helpful nor useful.
1. It's about trust and auditability, while you may not want or need it, there are a lot of customer that are either interested or legally obligated to know who have accessed certain data.
2. It's about dogfooding - how would you trust an identity and access system when the company does not even use it internally?
3. In general, there are quick buttons and template to do it if you don't want to worry about it, in the LLM age, this gets easier. Personally I prefer this because I intensely dislike "magic". This allow you to control, to the maximum degree possible, what is actually going on, despite not owning any of the physical aspect of the data center.
We had an AWS rep try to sell us on an AI tool to help with predicting the IAM permissions that our infrastructure code needs. My response was, essentially, "why have you built a deterministic system so complicated that it needs an AI to configure correctly?" I have not had an answer.
And I don't think you do either.
This would be very unwise from security standpoint. Internal access to customer stuff is granular and made hard for internal staff to gain, to minimize chances of screw up intentional or not.