An IAM role is an IAM identity that you can create in your account that has specific permissions. An IAM role is similar to an IAM user, in that it is an AWS identity with permission policies that determine what the identity can and cannot do in AWS. However, instead of being uniquely associated with one person, a role is intended to be assumable by anyone who needs it. Also, a role does not have standard long-term credentials such as a password or access keys associated with it. Instead, when you assume a role, it provides you with temporary security credentials for your role session.

Opal + AWS IAM Roles Integration Overview

Developers can easily discover and request for just-in-time short-lived access for IAM roles. Additionally, developers can request for the creation of new IAM roles. All access is granted through attributable federated IAM sessions. With Opal, engineers can access roles via AWS web console or command line.

Opal + AWS IAM Roles Use cases

Protect against breaches with least privilege

• Grant just-in-time access to AWS IAM roles that are auto-expiring and fully audited using Slack

• Ensure that privileged roles have the appropriate identity governance and approval configurations, such as multi-stage approvals, max duration, custom fields, and more

Accelerate employee access on paved roads

• Enable resource owners with the most context to approve access requests and provision access automatically via Slack

• Accelerate employee onboarding by enabling managers to request on behalf of their reports or enabling self-service discovery of resource bundles

• Automate on-call access by provisioning and deprovisioning access via on-call schedules

Simplify compliance without manual overhead

• Automate user access reviews so compliance teams can snapshot user listings, assign reviewers to self-service reviews, propagate access changes, and generate an auditor-friendly access report

• Review access of employees who have recently transferred roles or departments

Native engineering workflows

To support native developer workflows, Opal has:

• Easy way for developers to start sessions via the web or CLI

• Native IAM role generation natively within the product

• Audit logs for user attribution