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Cloud IAM Fundamentals
How identities, roles, policies, scopes, and temporary credentials map across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, with practical access troubleshooting.
What is the difference between authentication and authorization in a cloud IAM context?
Authentication answers "who is making this request", verifying an identity via credentials, a token, or a federated login. Authorization answers "is this identity allowed to do this specific action on this specific resource", evaluated after authentication succeeds, by checking the identity's attached policies against the requested action. A request can be perfectly authenticated (the caller genuinely is who they claim) and still be denied, because authorization is a separate check against what that identity is actually permitted to do.
What does the principle of least privilege mean in practice, and why is it hard to maintain over time?
Least privilege means granting an identity only the specific permissions it needs to do its job, nothing broader "to be safe" or "to save time." It's hard to maintain because permissions tend to accumulate, someone gets a broad role to unblock a one-time task and it's never revoked, or a service starts with wildcard permissions during initial development and nobody narrows them before shipping. Maintaining least privilege requires ongoing review (access audits, unused-permission detection), not just a careful initial setup, because the natural drift over time is always toward more access, not less.
What is the difference between a role and a policy in most cloud IAM systems?
The word "role" is provider-specific. In AWS, an IAM role is an assumable principal with policies attached. In Azure RBAC and Google Cloud IAM, a role is primarily a reusable collection of permissions; a role assignment or IAM policy binding grants that role to a principal at a scope. Always reduce the model to four questions: which principal, which permissions, on which resource scope, under which conditions. Translating the word "role" literally between providers causes dangerous design mistakes.