Identity and access management for Amazon Q Developer
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an AWS service that helps an administrator securely control access to AWS resources. IAM administrators control who can be authenticated (signed in) and authorized (have permissions) to use Amazon Q Developer resources. IAM is an AWS service that you can use with no additional charge.
Topics
- Audience
- Authenticating with identities
- Managing access using policies
- How Amazon Q Developer works with IAM
- Manage access to Amazon Q Developer with policies
- Amazon Q Developer permissions reference
- AWS managed policies for Amazon Q Developer
- Using service-linked roles for Amazon Q Developer and User Subscriptions
Audience
How you use IAM differs, depending on the work you do in Amazon Q.
Service user – If you use the Amazon Q service to do your job, then your administrator provides you with the credentials and permissions that you need. As you use more Amazon Q features to do your work, you might need additional permissions. Understanding how access is managed can help you request the right permissions from your administrator.
Service administrator – If you’re in charge of Amazon Q resources at your company, you probably have full access to Amazon Q. It’s your job to determine which Amazon Q features and resources your service users should access. You must then submit requests to your IAM administrator to change the permissions of your service users. Review the information on this page to understand the basic concepts of IAM. To learn more about how your company can use IAM with Amazon Q, see How Amazon Q works with IAM.
IAM administrator – If you’re an IAM administrator, you might want to learn details about how you can write policies to manage access to Amazon Q. If you’re an IAM administrator, consider learning the details about how you can write policies to manage IAM user access to services. For information that’s specific to Amazon Q, see AWS Regions managed policies for Amazon Q.
Authenticating with identities
Authentication is how you sign in to AWS using your identity credentials. You must be authenticated (signed in to AWS) as the AWS account root user, an IAM user, or by assuming an IAM role.
You can sign in to AWS as a federated identity by using credentials provided through an identity source. AWS IAM Identity Center (IAM Identity Center) users, your company’s single sign-on authentication, and your Google or Facebook credentials are examples of federated identities. When you sign in as a federated identity, your administrator previously set up identity federation using IAM roles. When you access AWS by using federation, you are indirectly assuming a role.
Depending on the type of user you are, you can sign in to the AWS Management Console or the AWS access portal. For more information about signing in to AWS, see How to sign in to your AWS account in the AWS Sign-In User Guide.
Regardless of the authentication method that you use, you might also be required to provide additional security information. For example, AWS recommends that you use multi-factor authentication (MFA) to increase the security of your account. To learn more, see Multi-factor authentication in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide and Using multi-factor authentication (MFA) in AWS in the IAM User Guide.
AWS account root user
When you first create an AWS account, you begin with a single sign-in identity that has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. This identity is called the AWS account root user and is accessed by signing in with the email address and password that you used to create the account. We strongly recommend that you don’t use the root user for your everyday tasks. Safeguard your root user credentials and use them to perform tasks that only the root user can perform. For the complete list of tasks that require you to sign in as the root user, see Tasks that require root user credentials in the IAM User Guide.
Federated identity
As a best practice, require human users, including users that require administrator access, to use federation with an identity provider to access AWS services by using temporary credentials.
A federated identity is a user from your enterprise user directory, a web identity provider, the AWS Directory Service, the Identity Center directory, or any user that accesses AWS services by using credentials provided through an identity source. When federated identities access AWS accounts, they assume roles, and the roles provide temporary credentials.
For centralized access management, we recommend that you use AWS IAM Identity Center. You can create users and groups in IAM Identity Center, or you can connect and synchronize to a set of users and groups in your own identity source for use across all your AWS accounts and applications. For information about IAM Identity Center, see What is IAM Identity Center? in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.
IAM users and groups
An IAM user is an identity within your AWS account that has specific permissions for a single person or application. Where possible, we recommend relying on temporary credentials instead of creating IAM users who have long-term credentials such as passwords and access keys. However, if you have specific use cases that require long-term credentials with IAM users, we recommend that you rotate access keys. For more information, see Rotate access keys regularly for use cases that require long-term credentials in the IAM User Guide.
An IAM group is an identity that specifies a collection of IAM users. You can’t sign in as a group. You can use groups to specify permissions for multiple users at a time. Groups make permissions easier to manage for large sets of users. For example, you could have a group named IAMAdmins and give that group permissions to administer IAM resources.
Users are different from roles. A user is uniquely associated with one person or application, but a role is intended to be assumable by anyone who needs it. Users have permanent long-term credentials, but roles provide temporary credentials. For more information, see When to create an IAM user (instead of a role) in the IAM User Guide.
IAM roles
An IAM role is an identity within your AWS account that has specific permissions. An IAM role is similar to an IAM user but is not associated with a specific person. You can temporarily assume an IAM role in the AWS Management Console by switching roles. You can assume a role by calling an AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) or AWS API operation or by using a custom URL. For more information about methods for using roles, see Using IAM roles in the IAM User Guide.
IAM roles with temporary credentials are useful in the following situations:
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Federated user access – To assign permissions to a federated identity, you create a role and define permissions for the role. When a federated identity authenticates, the identity is associated with the role and is granted the permissions that are defined by the role. For information about roles for federation, see Creating a role for a third-party Identity Provider in the IAM User Guide. If you use IAM Identity Center, you configure a permission set. To control what your identities can access after they authenticate, IAM Identity Center correlates the permission set to a role in IAM. For information about permissions sets, see Permission sets in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.
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Temporary IAM user permissions – An IAM user can assume an IAM role to temporarily take on different permissions for a specific task.
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Cross-account access – You can use an IAM role to allow someone (a trusted principal) in a different account to access resources in your account. Roles are the primary way to grant cross-account access. However, with some AWS services, you can attach a policy directly to a resource (instead of using a role as a proxy). For more information about the difference between roles and resource-based policies for cross-account access, see How IAM roles differ from resource-based policies in the IAM User Guide.
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Cross-service access – Some AWS services use features in other AWS services. A service might do this using the calling principal’s permissions, using a service role, or using a service-linked role.
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Principal permissions – When you use an IAM user or role to perform actions in AWS, you are considered a principal. Policies grant permissions to a principal. When you use some services, you might perform an action that then triggers another action in a different service. In this case, you must have permissions to perform both actions.
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Service role – A service role is an IAM role that a service assumes to perform actions on your behalf. An IAM administrator can create, modify, and delete a service role from within IAM. For more information, see Creating a role to delegate permissions to an AWS service in the IAM User Guide.
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Service-linked role – A service-linked role is a type of service role that is linked to an AWS service. The service can assume the role to perform an action on your behalf. Service-linked roles appear in your AWS account and are owned by the service. An IAM administrator can view but not edit the permissions for service-linked roles.
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Applications running on Amazon EC2 – You can use an IAM role to manage temporary credentials for applications that are running on an Amazon EC2 instance and making AWS CLI or AWS API requests. This is preferable to storing access keys within the Amazon EC2 instance. To assign an IAM role to an Amazon EC2 instance and make it available to all of its applications, you create an instance profile that is attached to the instance. An instance profile contains the role and enables programs that are running on the Amazon EC2 instance to get temporary credentials. For more information, see Using an IAM role to grant permissions to applications running on Amazon EC2 instances in the IAM User Guide.
For more information about whether to use IAM roles, see When to create an IAM role (instead of a user) in the IAM User Guide.
Managing access using policies
You control access in AWS by creating policies and attaching them to AWS identities or resources. A policy is an object in AWS that, when associated with an identity or resource, defines their permissions. AWS evaluates these policies when a principal (user, root user, or role session) makes a request. Permissions in the policies determine whether the request is allowed or denied. Most policies are stored in AWS as JSON documents. For more information about the structure and contents of JSON policy documents, see Overview of JSON policies in the IAM User Guide.
Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.
Every IAM entity (user or role) starts with no permissions. By default, users can do nothing, not even change their own password. To give a user permission to do something, an administrator must attach a permissions policy to a user. Or the administrator can add the user to a group that has the intended permissions. When an administrator gives permissions to a group, all users in that group are granted those permissions.
IAM policies define permissions for an action regardless of the method that you use to perform the operation. For example, suppose that you have a policy that allows the iam:GetRole
action. A user with that policy can get role information from the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS API.
Identity-based policies
Identity-based policies are JSON permissions policy documents that you can attach to an identity, such as an IAM user, role, or group. These policies control what actions users and roles can perform, on which resources, and under what conditions. For more information about how to create an identity-based policy, see Creating IAM policies in the IAM User Guide.
Identity-based policies can be further categorized as inline policies or managed policies. Inline policies are embedded directly into a single user, group, or role. Managed policies are standalone policies that you can attach to multiple users, groups, and roles in your AWS account. Managed policies include AWS managed policies and customer managed policies. For more information about how to choose between a managed policy or an inline policy, see Choosing between managed policies and inline policies in the IAM User Guide.
Resource-based policies
Resource-based policies are JSON policy documents that you attach to a resource such as an Amazon S3 bucket. Service administrators can use these policies to define what actions a specified principal (account member, user, or role) can perform on that resource and under what conditions. Resource-based policies are inline policies. There are no managed resource-based policies.
Access control lists (ACLs)
Access control lists (ACLs) are a type of policy that controls which principals (account members, users, or roles) have permissions to access a resource. ACLs are similar to resource-based policies, although they do not use the JSON policy document format. Amazon S3, AWS WAF, and Amazon VPC are examples of services that support ACLs. For more information about ACLs, see Access Control List (ACL) overview in the Amazon S3 User Guide.
Other policy types
AWS supports additional, less-common policy types. These policy types can set the maximum permissions granted to you by the more common policy types.
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Permissions boundaries – A permissions boundary is an advanced feature in which you set the maximum permissions that an identity-based policy can grant to an IAM entity (IAM user or role). You can set a permissions boundary for an entity. The resulting permissions are the intersection of an entity’s identity-based policies and its permissions boundaries. Resource-based policies that specify the user or role in the
Principal
field are not limited by the permissions boundary. An explicit deny in any of these policies overrides the allow. For more information about permissions boundaries, see Permissions boundaries for IAM entities in the IAM User Guide. -
Service control policies (SCPs) – SCPs are JSON policies that specify the maximum permissions for an organization or organizational unit (OU) in AWS Organizations. AWS Organizations is a service for grouping and centrally managing multiple AWS accounts that your business owns. If you enable all features in an organization, then you can apply SCPs to any or all of your accounts. The SCP limits permissions for entities in member accounts, including each AWS account root user. For more information about Organizations and SCPs, see How SCPs work in the AWS Organizations User Guide.
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Session policies – Session policies are advanced policies that you pass as a parameter when you programmatically create a temporary session for a role or federated user. The resulting session’s permissions are the intersection of the user or role’s identity-based policies and the session policies. Permissions can also come from a resource-based policy. An explicit deny in any of these policies overrides the allow. For more information, see Session policies in the IAM User Guide.
Multiple policy types
When multiple types of policies apply to a request, the resulting permissions are more complicated to understand. To learn how AWS determines whether to allow a request when multiple policy types are involved, see Policy evaluation logic in the IAM User Guide.