Day 39 : AWS and IAM Basics

User Data in AWS:

• When you launch an instance in Amazon EC2, you have the option of passing user data to the instance that can be used to perform common automated configuration tasks and even run scripts after the instance starts. You can pass two types of user data to Amazon EC2: shell scripts and cloud-init directives.

• You can also pass this data into the launch instance wizard as plain text, as a file (this is useful for launching instances using the command line tools), or as base64-encoded text (for API calls).

• This will save time and manual effort every time you launch an instance and want to install any application on it like apache, docker, Jenkins etc

IAM:

In the context of AWS, "IAM" stands for AWS Identity and Access Management. It's a web service that allows secure control over access to AWS resources. With IAM, you can manage users, groups, roles, and permissions, ensuring that only authorized individuals or entities can access specific AWS services and resources.

Task1:

• Launch EC2 instance with already installed Jenkins on it. Once server shows up in console, hit the IP address in browser and you Jenkins page should be visible.

• Take screenshot of User data and Jenkins page, this will verify the task completion.

Task2:

• Read more on IAM Roles and explain the IAM Users, Groups and Roles in your own terms.

• Create three Roles named: DevOps-User, Test-User and Admin.

IAM Role : IAM (Identity and Access Management) roles in cloud platforms like AWS and Google Cloud are like "permission sets" that allow users, services, or applications to access resources with temporary credentials, without needing long-term credentials. They provide a way to grant specific permissions to different identities, ensuring security and flexibility in managing access to cloud resources.

IAM Users : An IAM user is a digital identity within a cloud platform (like AWS) that represents a human user, application, or service interacting with resources. It's essentially a credentialed identity with specific permissions to access and perform actions on AWS resources.

IAM Groups: An IAM (Identity and Access Management) group in AWS is a collection of IAM users. It allows you to manage permissions for multiple users at once by applying policies to the group. Changes made to the group's permissions are automatically reflected for all users within the group.