Users

Users

IAM users represent a human user or programmatic workload and provides access to AWS resources or services. Users belong to a single parent account and consists of the following properties and credentials:

• Access Credentials: Programmatic long-lived credentials consisting of an access key ID and secret key.
• Path: The IAM namespace which contains the user.
• Login Profile: AWS web console credentials.
• MFA Device: MFA devices required for accessing AWS resources, whether through the web console or programmatically.
• SSL Certificates: May be used to authenticate with certain AWS services.
• SSH Keys: SSH public keys to be used with AWS Codecommit, a git repository service, during application development.

aws iam get-user --user-name $USERNAME

{
    "User": {
        "Path": "/",
        "UserName": "username",
        "UserId": "ADSAYFF72444NEI6MNIOP",
        "Arn": "arn:aws:iam::012345678910:user/username",
        "CreateDate": "2019-07-10T23:13:11+00:00",
        "Tags": [
            {
                "Key": "TagName",
                "Value": "TagValue"
            }
        ]
    }
}

Upon creating a new AWS account, a root user is automatically created, which has complete access to all cloud resources with limited exceptions. For this reason, it is recommended that you create an administrator user for everyday use and restrict access to root user credentials.

Console Login Process

There are two possible login flows depending on the type of user attempting to sign in.¹

Root User

To sign in as a root user, simply navigate to the sign-in page, select “Root User”, and enter the root user credentials and optional MFA code.

IAM User

To sign in to the AWS console as a non-root user, you can either use standard sign-in webpage and provide the target AWS account number or specify the account alias in the URL as such: https://<account_id_or_alias>.signin.aws.amazon.com/console/.