In a cloud or microservices environment, there are multiple services, databases, and APIs that require different levels of access for various types of users (e.g., administrators, end-users, services). Managing these permissions manually or without a centralized system can be error-prone and insecure.
How do you manage the identification and authorization of users and services in a distributed system, ensuring that they have the appropriate level of access to resources?
The IAM Pattern involves a centralized system for identity management, which could be an internal IAM solution or a third-party service like AWS IAM, Okta, or Auth0. The IAM system takes care of authenticating (verifying who you are) and authorizing (verifying what you are allowed to do) users and services.
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Centralized Management: A single place to manage users, roles, and permissions simplifies administration and improves security.
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Granular Control: Allows for finely-tuned access controls, including role-based access control (RBAC), attribute-based access control (ABAC), and more.
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Auditability: Actions taken by users and services can be logged and monitored, aiding in compliance and security oversight.
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Complexity: IAM systems can become complex to set up and maintain, particularly for large and dynamic organizations.
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Propagation Delay: Changes to access controls may take time to propagate across the distributed system.
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Local Access Control: Managing access controls at the level of individual services, but this approach lacks centralized management and can be error-prone.
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VPN and Network Security: Relying on network-level security to restrict access, but this lacks the fine-grained control offered by IAM systems.