AWS IAM Foundations

What I Learned

• - IAM permissions are easier to reason about when each policy has one clear purpose.
• - Roles are the cleaner path for temporary access between AWS services.
• - Least privilege needs testing, not guessing.

Why It Matters

IAM is the front door of every AWS account, so strong permission design is a cloud engineering and security foundation.

Mistakes and Challenges

• - Separating role trust policies from permission policies took repetition.
• - Policy examples were easy to copy, but harder to explain line by line.

Next Steps

• - Build a small S3 access lab with a restricted IAM role.
• - Use IAM Access Analyzer to review permissions.