Step-by-Step Guide to Creating an IAM User in AWS

Step 1: Go to the Amazon web services Sign-In console. Create an AWS Free Tier Account. 

Step 2: Try signing in with your root username and password

Step 3: Search in the search box entering “IAM user” as shown in the image.

Step 4: After you enter the IAM user page, you can see the IAM dashboard then go to the “users” option by clicking on it.

In the user sections try creating a user by clicking on the “create user” button, now you will follow through with 3 phases for creating an IAM user.

i. Specifying the user details

• Provide the username that you would like to create as an IAM user

ii. Setup the permissions

• Select the attach policies directly option, It’s meant to assign the policies individually for the IAM user.
• In the Permissions policies section go to the search box and enter EC2ReadOnly, you can we see the policy name with AmazonEC2ReadOnly select it to provide this policy access to creating IAM user.
• Similarly you can add on whatever permissions that you would like from the pre-created policies as per the requirement.
• They will be a case in which we can’t find the require based policies in that moment , you have to create policies as your own. 
  

iii. Review and create

• In this step you have to review the information that you provided, once verified then go for the create option.

• Finally, the IAM user is been created and you can see it on the dashboard as shown in the below figure.

Note: Till now the user creation is done, the root user can anytime may delete the user or customize the permission policies as needed.

In this, the title IAM stands for Identity Access Management. When we working on cloud services in a company. Different employee has different categories of access. The employees in the company are restricted to particular resource utilization and Administration has the complete access to review all employee’s work. Similarly in AWS, the root user has access to all the services managed by administrators. From the root user, we create the IAM users providing some specific permissions as per job role/position.

Through IAM users it will provide both Authentication and Authorization. They are as follows:

• Authentication: Authentication from the AWS account is provided through username and password. Whenever the user tries to log in, the verification of username and password will be done. It can be thought of as a gateway for accessing the resources.
• Authorization: Once authentication is provided secondly comes to authorizing the resources/services. Administration will assign this by providing access to resources/services of the users.

In this Article I will show you how to create an IAM user with the username “myuser1” [Authentication] and provide permission to view only the EC2 instances [ Authorization ]. So this IAM user can only view the EC2 instances and can’t modify the EC2 instances and can’t access the other services.