AWS Management Console

When first start­ing up with AWS, the Man­age­ment Con­sole is an essen­tial tool for nav­i­gat­ing Amazon’s cloud. Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) pro­vides a pletho­ra of ser­vices and tools for design­ing, imple­ment­ing, safe­guard­ing, and man­ag­ing cloud-based apps and ser­vices. This ​“afflu­ence” can, con­verse­ly, make it dif­fi­cult to obtain insights into per­for­mance, uti­liza­tion, and costs, par­tic­u­lar­ly for orga­ni­za­tions with mul­ti­ple AWS accounts and a large num­ber of self-pro­vi­sion­ing users along through mul­ti­ple lines of business. 

To resolve these issues, AWS offers the AWS Man­age­ment Con­sole, a free web-based app that allows for sin­gle-pane man­age­ment of AWS accounts, ser­vices, and users. The AWS Con­sole is also avail­able as a mobile app in some regions. The pub­lic is still out on its user inter­face — some crit­ics like it, while oth­ers find it dif­fi­cult to use. Any­one accus­tomed to the user-friend­ly high­ly cen­tral­ized con­trol pan­els of domain reg­is­tra­tion plat­forms will undoubt­ed­ly find the AWS Man­age­ment Con­sole intim­i­dat­ing at first. This arti­cle aims to bet­ter under­stand the AWS Man­age­ment Con­sole so that it can become your assis­tant when man­ag­ing your AWS operations.

The AWS man­age­ment con­sole includes an inter­face for per­form­ing AWS tasks such as work­ing with Ama­zon S3 buck­ets, ini­ti­at­ing and link­ing to Ama­zon EC2 instances, con­fig­ur­ing Ama­zon Cloud­Watch alarms, and so on. The var­i­ous parts of the AWS Con­sole home page serve as access points to AWS ser­vices, solu­tions, and learn­ing resources, as well as third-par­ty tools in the AWS Mar­ket­place. A cus­tomer can use the con­sole to over­see their cloud com­put­ing, cloud stor­age, and oth­er resources that are host­ed on the Ama­zon Web Ser­vices infra­struc­ture. The con­sole com­mu­ni­cates with all AWS resources, including

• Elas­tic Com­pute Cloud: an inter­net ser­vice that enables busi­ness­es to exe­cute appli­ca­tion pro­grams in the Ama­zon Web Ser­vices pub­lic cloud.
• Ama­zon Sim­ple Stor­age Ser­vice: a scal­able, high-speed, low-cost web-based cloud stor­age ser­vice engi­neered for online data back­up and stor­ing of appli­ca­tions and data.
• Elas­tic Load Bal­anc­ing: a load-bal­anc­ing ser­vice for Ama­zon Web Ser­vices deployments.
• Ama­zon Rela­tion­al Data­base Ser­vice: a SQL data­base ser­vice that is com­plete­ly man­aged by Amazon.
• Auto Scal­ing: a fea­ture of cloud com­put­ing ser­vices that instan­ta­neous­ly adds or clears com­pute resources based on exist­ing usage.
• AWS OpsWorks: an Ama­zon Web Ser­vices cloud com­put­ing ser­vice that man­ages infra­struc­ture inte­gra­tion for cloud administrators.
• AWS Iden­ti­ty and Access Man­age­ment: a data­base ser­vice devel­oped for mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem users and stor­ing infor­ma­tion about how they are authenticated.
• Cloud­Watch: an AWS com­po­nent that mon­i­tors AWS resources as well as cus­tom appli­ca­tions that run on the Ama­zon infra­struc­ture. AWS users can also man­age their accounts, includ­ing track­ing their month­ly spend­ing. A user can exe­cute new appli­ca­tions and super­vise those that are already in place.

The AWS Man­age­ment Con­sole also includes learn­ing pro­grams, such as wiz­ards and work­flows, to assist users in adjust­ing to the cloud. Whichev­er AWS ser­vices you may choose run; you’ll require a way to keep track of them all. The brows­er-based man­age­ment con­sole is an effec­tive way to learn about a service’s fea­tures and how it will oper­ate in prac­tice. Few AWS admin­is­tra­tion tasks can­not be per­formed from the con­sole, which includes a pletho­ra of use­ful visu­al­iza­tions and data entry. How­ev­er, as you become more acquaint­ed with how things work, and par­tic­u­lar­ly as your AWS oper­a­tions become more chal­leng­ing, you will most like­ly find your­self doing more of your real work away from the console.

Nav­i­gat­ing to a Ser­vice #

You can access a ser­vice dash­board from the AWS Man­age­ment Con­sole in a vari­ety of ways. To open a ser­vice loca­tion tab, click Ser­vices in the nav­i­ga­tion bar. You can do so there.

1. Per­form a text search for a service.
2. Select whether to view the ser­vices in cat­e­gories or alpha­bet­i­cal order.
3. View a list of the most fre­quent­ly accessed ser­vice consoles.

Users can also launch a drop-down alpha­bet­ized list of all ser­vices by click­ing inside the Find Ser­vices text box, and then nav­i­gate to the pre­ferred ser­vice or uti­lize text search to fil­ter the list. There are also use short­cuts for nav­i­gat­ing to fre­quent­ly used ser­vices offered by the AWS Con­sole itself, which keeps things simple.

AWS Iden­ti­ty and Access Man­age­ment as a ser­vice #

AWS pri­or­i­tizes cloud secu­ri­ty above all else. When you host your envi­ron­ment in the cloud, you can be con­fi­dent that it is host­ed in a data cen­ter or a net­work archi­tec­ture designed to meet the most strin­gent secu­ri­ty stan­dards. Fur­ther­more, this increased lev­el of secu­ri­ty is obtain­able on a pay-as-you-go frame­work, which means there is no ini­tial cost and the cost of using the ser­vice is sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er than in an on-premis­es environment. 

The Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) cloud offers a safe vir­tu­al plat­form for users to exe­cute their appli­ca­tions. When com­pared to on-premis­es secu­ri­ty, AWS secu­ri­ty offers a high­er lev­el of data secu­ri­ty at a low­er cost to its users. There are sev­er­al dif­fer­ent types of secu­ri­ty ser­vices, but by far the most com­mon is Iden­ti­ty and Access Man­age­ment (IAM). AWS IAM allows you to safe­ly reg­u­late your users access to AWS ser­vices and resources. You can use IAM to estab­lish and han­dle AWS users and groups, as well as use autho­riza­tions to grant and deny them access to AWS resources. AWS Iden­ti­ty and Access Man­age­ment (IAM) is a key secu­ri­ty ser­vice that allows you to estab­lish and han­dle role-based access to AWS resources and ser­vices. IAM is a cen­tral­ized con­trol cen­ter with­in AWS that incor­po­rates all oth­er AWS Services. 

IAM allows you to share access at dif­fer­ent lev­els of autho­riza­tion, and it allows you to han­dle access to AWS ser­vices and resources in a very safe man­ner You can use IAM to cre­ate groups and grant those users or groups access to spe­cif­ic servers, or you can refuse them access to the ser­vice. IAM includes Mul­ti-fac­tor authen­ti­ca­tion (MFA) pro­tec­tion and the abil­i­ty to set up a per­son­al­ized pass­word rota­tion pol­i­cy for your whole orga­ni­za­tion Before AWS or IAM, pass­words were fre­quent­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed in cor­po­rate set­tings in an extreme­ly unsafe way: over the phone or via email. 

There was fre­quent­ly only one admin pass­word, which was gen­er­al­ly saved in a spe­cif­ic loca­tion, or there was only one per­son who could recon­fig­ure it, and you had to call the per­son to ask for the admin pass­word over the phone, which was not at all reli­able, because any­one could stroll by and col­lect infor­ma­tion, then walk away with your pass­word and gain access to your sys­tem and infor­ma­tion. Cur­rent­ly, we have a more encrypt­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool: Slack, a third-par­ty appli­ca­tion host­ed on AWS. It enables peo­ple to share a doc­u­ment via the appli­ca­tion while pre­vent­ing pri­va­cy leak­age. The IAM process­es con­sist of the com­po­nents list­ed below:

1. A prin­ci­pal is an enti­ty that can exe­cute actions on an AWS resource. A prin­ci­pal can be a user, a role, or an application.
2. Authen­ti­ca­tion is the pro­ce­dure of ver­i­fy­ing the iden­ti­ty of the prin­ci­pal attempt­ing to use an AWS prod­uct. The prin­ci­pal must pro­vide the nec­es­sary pass­words or keys for verification.
3. Request: A prin­ci­pal makes a query to AWS indi­cat­ing the action to be per­formed and which resource should car­ry it out.
4. Autho­riza­tion: All resources are barred by default. IAM only approves a request if all of its com­po­nents are per­mit­ted by a cor­re­spond­ing pol­i­cy. AWS autho­rizes the action after ver­i­fy­ing and approv­ing the request.
5. Actions and resource: A resource can be viewed, cre­at­ed, edit­ed, or delet­ed using actions. A set of actions can be con­duct­ed on a resource asso­ci­at­ed with your AWS account.

Com­po­nents of IAM #

Users, Groups, Poli­cies, and Roles are the fun­da­men­tal com­po­nents of IAM. A group is made up of many users. Poli­cies are the enablers that per­mit or refuse a link based on pol­i­cy set, per­mis­sion, and con­trol access to AWS resources. AWS stores poli­cies as JSON doc­u­ments. Per­mis­sions gov­ern who will have access to resources and what activ­i­ties they can take. For instance, a pol­i­cy could grant an IAM user full rights to one of Ama­zon S3’s buck­ets. The fol­low­ing data would be includ­ed in the policy:

• Who can access it.
• What activ­i­ties can the user take.
• Which AWS resources can the user obtain.
• When they are available.

Poli­cies are clas­si­fied into two types: man­aged poli­cies and inline poli­cies. A man­aged pol­i­cy is a pre­de­fined pol­i­cy that you can apply to var­i­ous enti­ties in your AWS account (users, groups, and roles). Man­aged poli­cies, whether AWS-man­aged or cus­tomer-man­aged, are iden­ti­ty-based poli­cies that are affixed to var­i­ous users and/​or groups, where­as Inline poli­cies are poli­cies that you define and incor­po­rate explic­it­ly into a sin­gle enti­ty (user, group, or role). Roles are tem­po­rary iden­ti­fiers that can be assigned to an instance when necessary.

IAM’s main fea­ture is that it enables users to gen­er­ate unique user­names and pass­words for indi­vid­ual users or resources and assign access to them. Oth­er promi­nent attrib­ut­es include:

1. Requests can be restrict­ed. You can, for exam­ple, allow the user to access infor­ma­tion but refuse the user the chance to update infor­ma­tion via policies.
2. IAM embraces mul­ti-fac­tor authen­ti­ca­tion (MFA), which requires users to enter their user­name and pass­word, as well as a one-time pass­word gen­er­at­ed by their phone; a ran­dom­ly gen­er­at­ed num­ber used as an extra authen­ti­ca­tion factor.
3. IAM can be instruct­ed to accept that authen­ti­ca­tor and then grant access cen­tered on it. This can also be used to give users the abil­i­ty to Use a sin­gle pass­word for both on-premis­es and cloud-based work.
4. There is no added cost for using IAM security.
5. The IAM pass­word pol­i­cy enables you to wire­less­ly reset or adjust pass­words. You can also spec­i­fy how a user should choose a pass­word or how often a user can try to enter a pass­word before being refused access.

Con­clu­sion #

When invest­ing time in the AWS Cloud, the AWS Man­age­ment Con­sole can become a very valu­able tool and an assis­tant.. The Man­age­ment Con­sole is a com­pre­hen­sive and well-sup­port­ed tool for man­ag­ing your AWS resources and ser­vices in a cen­tral­ized and robust manner.