IAM Basics

What I Learned

• - Users, groups, roles, and policies are the core IAM building blocks.
• - Roles are better than long-term access keys when AWS services need to talk to each other.
• - Least privilege means giving only the permissions needed for a task.

Why It Matters

IAM is one of the most important cloud security controls because permission mistakes can expose an entire AWS account.

Mistakes and Challenges

• - Separating trust policies from permission policies took repetition.
• - Policy examples were easy to copy but harder to explain line by line.

What I Built/Tested

• - Created an IAM policy for limited S3 access.
• - Reviewed how an IAM role can be attached to an AWS service.
• - Tested what happens when a permission is missing.