To kick off getting hands-on practice and learning AWS I decided to start with learning all about AWS Identity Access Management (IAM). As you know security in the cloud is crucial and adequately controlling access to your AWS resources is imperative. IAM is a mammoth of a topic and isn’t something that I feel can be learned in a short amount of time but getting to grips with the basics and then putting it into practice will help understand IAM. I want to detail how I intend to learn about IAM, hoping that the resources I used can help you learn too. There are many resources about AWS IAM from documentation, YouTube videos and labs! I am a Kinesthetic learner so most of my resources will be lab focused but the AWS documentation will help me tremendously. Let’s start off with the docs. The IAM User Guide is extremely useful in detailing IAM when to use it and how it works. I’ve provided a short list of topics within the docs that I think will be useful when learning.

Documentation:

• What is IAM

• Permission and Policies

• Getting Set Up

• IAM Tutorials

• Security

The user guide has so much more, and I intend to get familiar with these additional sections.

If you didn’t know AWS have a wide range of FREE self-paced workshops and labs (Although accessing these workshops is free, AWS services that you use in the workshop/labs may cost but these usually are not very expensive providing you clean up/shut down the services you used). Here is a list of IAM focused workshops that I will be doing to get familiar with IAM. They range in level from 100 – Foundational to 400 – Advanced, so you can decide which ones suit you best.

Workshops/Labs:

• Cognito JWT Deep Dive

• IAM Policy Learning Experience

• Amazon Cognito Workshop

• Amazon Verified Permissions

• IAM Troubleshooting Workshop

• Applying Attribute Based Control in AWS - Workshop

• How and When to Use IAM Policy Types

• Refining IAM Permissions Like A Pro

• Integrating AWS IAM Access Analyzer in a CI/CD Pipeline

• Control Design Workshop

If talks and videos are more your thing, after some brief research I found a few that could be useful. Videos:

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Basics | AWS Training For Beginners

• AWS re:Inforce 2023 - A first-principles approach: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) (IAM201)

I will over time come back to this post and add/remove and comment on resources I found were or weren’t useful but for now, this post refers to what I intend to use to help me learn IAM so over time as I get through each resource I’ll know how beneficial It was for me! Happy learning!