Advanced IAM Patterns
Basic IAM covers users, roles, and policies. Advanced IAM is about scaling identity management across dozens of accounts, preventing privilege escalation, and building fine-grained access controls that adapt to context. These patterns are essential for organizations operating multi-account AWS environments.
What This Course Covers​
Permission Boundaries​
Permission boundaries set the maximum permissions an IAM principal can have, regardless of what identity-based policies are attached. They are critical for delegation: when you allow developers to create their own IAM roles (for Terraform deployments, Lambda functions, etc.), permission boundaries prevent them from creating roles with more permissions than they should have.
Service Control Policies (SCPs)​
SCPs are guardrails applied at the AWS Organizations level. They do not grant permissions; they define the ceiling. An SCP that denies ec2:RunInstances in us-west-1 means no one in that OU can launch EC2 instances in that region, regardless of their IAM policies. SCPs are the backbone of multi-account governance.
Cross-Account Access Patterns​
As organizations grow beyond a single AWS account, workloads in one account frequently need to access resources in another. Cross-account IAM roles with carefully scoped trust policies are the standard pattern. This module covers role chaining, external ID usage for third-party access, and the interaction between resource policies and identity policies across account boundaries.
Session Policies and ABAC​
Session policies are inline policies passed during AssumeRole or federation that further restrict the permissions of a session. Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) uses tags on principals and resources to make access decisions, reducing the number of policies needed as your environment scales.
Module Outline​
| Module | Topic |
|---|---|
| 1 | Permission boundaries: preventing privilege escalation in delegated administration |
| 2 | Service control policies: designing guardrails for multi-account organizations |
| 3 | Cross-account access: trust policies, external IDs, and resource policies |
| 4 | Session policies: scoping temporary credentials for specific tasks |
| 5 | ABAC: tag-based access control patterns that scale |
| 6 | Putting it together: multi-account IAM architecture with Terraform and CDK |
Advanced IAM Patterns
Get the complete 6-module course with Terraform, CDK, and CloudFormation implementations for permission boundaries, SCPs, cross-account roles, and ABAC patterns.