Create an IAM user for workloads that can't use IAM roles

Important

As a best practice, we recommend that you require your human users to use temporary credentials when accessing AWS. You can use an identity provider for your human users to provide federated access to AWS accounts by assuming roles, which provide temporary credentials. For centralized access management, we recommend that you use AWS IAM Identity Center (IAM Identity Center) to manage access to your accounts and permissions within those accounts. You can create and manage your user identities, including your administrative user, with IAM Identity Center. If you are using an external identity provider, you can also configure the access permissions for user identities in IAM Identity Center. For more information, see What is AWS IAM Identity Center in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

If your use case requires IAM users with programmatic access and long-term credentials, we recommend that you establish procedures to update access keys when needed. For more information, see Update access keys.

To perform some account and service management tasks, you must sign in using root user credentials. To view the tasks that require you to sign in as the root user, see Tasks that require root user credentials.

To create an IAM user for workloads that can't use IAM roles

Choose the tab for the method you want to follow to create the IAM user for a workload:

Minimum permissions

To perform the following steps, you must have at least the following IAM permissions:

• iam:AddUserToGroup

• iam:AttachGroupPolicy

• iam:CreateAccessKey

• iam:CreateGroup

• iam:CreateServiceSpecificCredential

• iam:CreateUser

• iam:GetAccessKeyLastUsed

• iam:GetAccountPasswordPolicy

• iam:GetAccountSummary

• iam:GetGroup

• iam:GetLoginProfile

• iam:GetPolicy

• iam:GetRole

• iam:GetUser

• iam:ListAccessKeys

• iam:ListAttachedGroupPolicies

• iam:ListAttachedUserPolicies

• iam:ListGroupPolicies

• iam:ListGroups

• iam:ListGroupsForUser

• iam:ListInstanceProfilesForRole

• iam:ListMFADevices

• iam:ListPolicies

• iam:ListRoles

• iam:ListRoleTags

• iam:ListSSHPublicKeys

• iam:ListServiceSpecificCredentials

• iam:ListSigningCertificates

• iam:ListUserPolicies

• iam:ListUserTags

• iam:ListUsers

• iam:UploadSSHPublicKey

• iam:UploadSigningCertificate

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IAM console

1. Follow the sign-in procedure appropriate to your user type as described in the topic How to sign in to AWS in the AWS Sign-In User Guide.

2. On the Console Home page, select the IAM service.

3. In the navigation pane, choose Users and then choose Create users.

4. On the Specify user details page, do the following:

   1. For User name, type WorkloadName. Replace WorkloadName with the name of the workload that will be using the account.

   2. Choose Next.

5. (Optional) On the Set Permissions page, do the following:

   1. Choose Add user to group.

   2. Choose Create group.

   3. In the Create user group dialog box, for User group name type a name that represents the use of the workloads in the group. For this example, use the name Automation.

   4. Under Permissions policies select the checkbox for the PowerUserAccess managed policy.

      Tip

      Enter Power into the Permissions policies search box to quickly find the managed policy.

   5. Choose Create user group.

   6. Back on the page with the list of user groups, select the checkbox for your new user group. Choose Refresh if you don't see the new user group in the list.

   7. Choose Next.

6. (Optional) In the Tags section, add metadata to the user by attaching tags as key-value pairs. For more information, see Tags for AWS Identity and Access Management resources.

7. Verify the user group memberships for the new user. When you are ready to proceed, choose Create user.

8. A status notification appears informing you that the user was created successfully. Select View user to go to the user details page

9. Select the Security credentials tab. Then create the credentials needed for the workload.

   • Access keys–Select Create access key to generate and download access keys for the user.

     Important

     This is your only opportunity to view or download the secret access keys, and you must provide this information to your users before they can use the AWS API. Save the user's new access key ID and secret access key in a safe and secure place. You will not have access to the secret keys again after this step.

   • SSH public keys for AWS CodeCommit–Select Upload SSH public key to upload an SSH public key so that the user can communicate with CodeCommit repositories over SSH.

   • HTTPS Git credentials for AWS CodeCommit–Select Generate credentials to generate a unique set of user credentials to use with Git repositories. Select Download credentials to save the user name and password to a .csv file. This is the only time that information is available. If you forget or lose the password you will need to reset it.

   • Credentials for Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)–Select Generate credentials to generate a service-specific user credentials to use with Amazon Keyspaces. Select Download credentials to save the user name and password to a .csv file. This is the only time that information is available. If you forget or lose the password you will need to reset it.

     Important

     Service-specific credentials are long-term credentials associated with a specific IAM user and can only be used for the service they were created for. To give IAM roles or federated identities permissions to access all your AWS resources using temporary credentials, use AWS authentication with the SigV4 authentication plugin for Amazon Keyspaces. For more information see, Using temporary credentials to connect to Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) using an IAM role and the SigV4 plugin in the Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) Developer Guide.

   • X.509 Signing certificates–Select Create X.509 Certificate if you need to make secure SOAP-protocol requests and are in a Region that's not supported by AWS Certificate Manager. ACM is the preferred tool to provision, manage, and deploy your server certificates. For more information about using ACM, see the AWS Certificate Manager User Guide.

You have created a user with programmatic access and configured it with the PowerUserAccess job function. This user's permissions policy grants full access to every service except for IAM and AWS Organizations.

You can use this same process to give additional workloads programmatic access to your AWS account resources, if the workloads are unable to assume IAM roles. This procedure used the PowerUserAccess managed policy to assign permissions. To follow the best practice of least privilege, consider using a more restrictive policy or creating a custom policy that restricts access to only resources required by the program. To learn about using policies that restrict user permissions to specific AWS resources, see Access management for AWS resources and Example IAM identity-based policies. To add additional users to the user group after it's created, see Edit users in IAM user groups.

AWS CLI

1. Create a user named Automation.

   • aws iam create-user

   
                 aws iam create-user \
                     --user-name Automation

2. Create an IAM user group named AutomationGroup, attach the AWS managed policy PowerUserAccess to the group, and then add the Automation user to the group.

   Note

   An AWS managed policy is a standalone policy that is created and administered by AWS. Each policy has its own Amazon Resource Name (ARN) that includes the policy name. For example, arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/IAMReadOnlyAccess is an AWS managed policy. For more information about ARNs, see IAM ARNs. For a list of AWS managed policies for AWS services, see AWS managed policies.

   • aws iam create-group

     
                       aws iam create-group \
                           --group-name AutomationGroup

   • aws iam attach-group-policy

     
                       aws iam attach-group-policy \
                           --policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/PowerUserAccess \
                           --group-name AutomationGroup

   • aws iam add-user-to-group

     
                      aws iam add-user-to-group \
                          --user-name Automation \
                          --group-name AutomationGroup
                    

   • Run the aws iam get-group command to list the AutomationGroup and its members.

     
                     aws iam get-group \
                          --group-name AutomationGroup
                   

3. Create the security credentials needed for the workload.

   • Create access keys for testing–aws iam create-access-key

     
                            aws iam create-access-key \
                                --user-name Automation

     The output of this command displays the secret access key and the access key ID. Record and store this information in a secure location. If these credentials are lost, they can't be recovered, and you must create a new access key.

     Important

     These IAM user access keys are long-term credentials that present a security-risk to your account. After you have completed testing, we recommend that you delete these access keys. If you have scenarios in which you are considering access keys, investigate whether you can enable MFA for your workload IAM user and use aws sts get-session-token to obtain temporary credentials for the session instead of using IAM access keys.

   • Upload SSH public keys for AWS CodeCommit–aws iam upload-ssh-public-key

     The following example assumes that you have your SSH public keys stored in the file sshkey.pub.

     
                            aws upload-ssh-public-key \
                                --user-name Automation \
                                --ssh-public-key-body file://sshkey.pub

   • Upload an X.509 signing certificate–aws iam upload-signing-certificate

     Upload an X.509 certificate if you need to make secure SOAP-protocol requests and are in a Region that's not supported by AWS Certificate Manager. ACM is the preferred tool to provision, manage, and deploy your server certificates. For more information about using ACM, see the AWS Certificate Manager User Guide.

     The following example assumes that you have your X.509 signing certificate stored in the file certificate.pem.

     
                           aws iam upload-signing-certificate \
                           --user-name Automation \
                           --certificate-body file://certificate.pem
                         

You can use this same process to give additional workloads programmatic access to your AWS account resources, if the workloads are unable to assume IAM roles. This procedure used the PowerUserAccess managed policy to assign permissions. To follow the best practice of least privilege, consider using a more restrictive policy or creating a custom policy that restricts access to only resources required by the program. To learn about using policies that restrict user permissions to specific AWS resources, see Access management for AWS resources and Example IAM identity-based policies. To add additional users to the user group after it's created, see Edit users in IAM user groups.