How does access control differ through IAM roles and IAM policies in Amazon Web Services?
sobes.tech AI
Answer from AI
In AWS IAM, roles and policies are different but interconnected access management mechanisms.
-
IAM roles are a set of permissions that can be temporarily assigned to users, services, or resources. Roles are not tied to a specific user and are used for delegating rights, for example, to an EC2 instance or a Lambda function.
-
IAM policies are JSON documents that define specific permissions (access to resources and actions). Policies can be attached to roles, users, or groups.
In simpler terms, a policy describes what is allowed, and a role is an entity to which these permissions are assigned for use.
Example: an EC2 role can have a policy that allows reading from S3, and this role is assigned to an EC2 instance so it can access the necessary data.