AWS IAM Explained: How Users, Groups, and Roles Control Cloud Access

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a service that controls who can access resources within an AWS account, eliminating the need to share root credentials. IAM Users are individual identities created for people or applications, each with their own credentials, while IAM Groups allow administrators to assign permissions collectively rather than one user at a time. IAM Roles function like users but carry no permanent credentials; instead, they issue temporary, auto-expiring access tokens to services such as EC2 or Lambda that need to interact with other AWS resources. This approach is considered more secure than hardcoding access keys, since temporary credentials reduce the risk of long-term exposure if a system is compromised. Together, these three IAM components provide a layered, least-privilege framework for managing access across an AWS environment.