Getting started with IAM

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps you securely control access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and your account resources. IAM can also keep your sign-in credentials private. You don't specifically sign up to use IAM. There is no charge to use IAM.

How you use IAM depends on your job function. See When do I use IAM? for role-specific guidance.

Use IAM to give identities, such as users and roles, access to resources in your account. For example, you can use IAM with existing users in your corporate directory that you manage external to AWS or you can create users in AWS using AWS IAM Identity Center. Federated identities assume defined IAM roles to access the resources they need. For more information about IAM Identity Center, see What is IAM Identity Center? in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

Note

IAM is integrated with several AWS products. For a list of services that support IAM, see AWS services that work with IAM.

To learn about getting started with AWS, creating an administrative user, an AWS Organizations, and using multiple services to solve a problem such as building and launching your first project, see the Getting Started Resource Center.

For hands-on practice with common IAM tasks such as creating roles for cross-account access and using tags for attribute-based access control, see IAM tutorials.