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IAM is NOT from any lineage. It has grown organically and is complicated, just as any other policy language. AWS even uses an automatic proof assistant to verify IAM policies.

However, the secret to IAM in AWS is to NOT use IAM. Just create separate AWS accounts for separate services and only share whatever resources are needed. Then you can have dead simple IAM policies because you won't need to do granular permissions ("AWS role X can access database Y").

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> Just create separate AWS accounts for separate services

My understanding is that different AWS accounts have different mappings of availability zones, so it's very easy to suddenly find yourself with an unexpected bandwidth bill due to all the cross-az traffic.

I've been irritated at AWS (and the other large cloud providers) that they charge $0.01/GB for cross-az traffic. That's $3.24/Mbps -- about the same I was paying for internet transit (as in: from London to anywhere in the world) 20 years ago, and this is just between two datacenters in the same city controlled by the same organisation, markup must be 10,000x or more considering these places are cross-connected with massive bundles of fiber!

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