IAMbic: Bridging the Gap Between IAM Changes and Version Control

Version control has become an integral part of software development and cloud infrastructure management. In the world of AWS, managing IAM (Identity and Access Management) permissions and changes can be challenging, especially when multiple engineers have access to modify roles, policies, and permissions.

IAMbic works alongside Terraform

IAMbic is a tool designed to track all of your AWS IAM changes in version control, no matter how they are made. Whether you're using Terraform, Cloudformation, or directly making changes via the AWS Management Console, IAMbic ensures that you have a complete history of your IAM setup. Every change, every update, and every modification gets a Git commit. This means that alongside your infrastructure-as-code, you'll have a Git repository that represents the exact state of your IAM, with Git history showing when the changes happened.

CloudTrail Logging - A Step Forward

Recently, IAMbic introduced support for logging CloudTrail messages associated with IAM changes. CloudTrail, AWS's logging solution, gives detailed records of events, making it the perfect pairing for IAMbic's monitoring.

For instance, consider the following scenario. An engineer directly creates an IAM user with sensitive permissions using the AWS console. IAMbic detects this and automatically imports the change to your repository.

Diving deeper into the commit, we notice the commit message points to a CloudTrail message: CloudTrail Change Detail. Not only can we identify the user who made the change, but the audit trail also provides granular details about the modification.

The Benefits

1. Accountability: Knowing exactly who made changes to IAM configurations, ensuring that only authorized changes are made.
2. Recovery: If a change causes an issue, having a complete history allows teams to git revert changes quickly and instruct IAMbic to apply them back to the cloud.
3. Compliance and Auditing: With an extensive history and details from CloudTrail, meeting compliance standards and conducting audits become a lot easier.

Setting Up IAMbic with CloudTrail

For those interested in leveraging this integration, the official IAMbic documentation provides a step-by-step guide on how to configure IAMbic to log CloudTrail messages for IAM changes.

Conclusion

As our cloud environments grow more complex, tools like IAMbic play a critical role in ensuring stability, accountability, and security. The integration of CloudTrail takes it a step further, giving a detailed view of each change. So, next time you're wondering about a mysterious IAM modification, remember: IAMbic has your back.

If you're as passionate about IAM management as we are and want to discuss best practices, ask questions, or simply stay updated, we invite you to join our dedicated Slack community.