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AWS: Managing Access to Identity Center Groups

This example has two accounts and two groups; we model access to a Staging and a Production account. Here we have two groups: R&D and Prod Access. Members of the R&D groups are allowed full access to resources within the Staging account and read-only access to resources within the Production Account. Members of the Prod Access group are given full access to EC2 and S3 inside the Production Account.

We will be using Abbey to allow a user to request EC2 or S3 access to the Production account by being adding them to the Prod Access group.

Before you start

  1. Make sure you have:

  2. Make sure you setup:

Step 1: Create Accounts Resources

The starter kit has two example accounts, Staging and Production, to get you started.

accounts.tf
resource "aws_organizations_account" "staging" {
  name = "Staging"
-  email = "replace-me@example.com" #CHANGEME
+  email = "staging_owner@example.com" # Use the email of an account in Identity Center.
}

resource "aws_organizations_account" "production" {
  name = "Production"
-  email = "replace-me@example.com" #CHANGEME
+  email = "production_owner@example.com" # Use the email of an account in Identity Center.
}

Step 2: Configure your Grant Kit

Configure Output

Grant Kits rely on your GitHub account and repository name to output access changes, which we'll set through Terraform local variables. Update the locals block in main.tf with your account_name and repo_name

main.tf
 locals {
  account_name = "" #CHANGEME
  repo_name = "" #CHANGEME
  ...
}

Configure Reviewers

Workflow defines who should approve an access request.

Let's update the reviewers block by adding yourself as the reviewer by switching replace-me@example.com with the email address you use to sign into Abbey.

main.tf
 resource "abbey_grant_kit" "..." {
   ...
   workflow = {
     steps = [
       {
         reviewers = {
-          one_of = ["replace-me@example.com"] # CHANGEME
+          one_of = ["alice@example.com"]

Step 3: Link AWS Identity Center with Abbey

Now you'll need to link AWS Identity Center with Abbey. 


curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ABBEY_API_TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  https://api.abbey.io/v1/users/<user_id>/apps \
  -d '{"type": "aws_identitystore", "data": {"id": "<your AWS Identity Center user ID>"}}'

Step 4: Deploy Your Starter Kit

First, add your GitHub-related secrets to your repo's repository secrets:

  • AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID

  • AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

  • ABBEY_TOKEN

You can find the AWS keys in your AWS account.

The ABBEY_TOKEN is your API token.

What should it look like?

To deploy your Starter Kit, follow instructions from Deploy Your Grant Kit.

Step 5: Automate Access Management

🎉 Congratulations! Abbey is now managing permissions to your Resource for you. 🎉

You can now start requesting and approving access by following the Request Access and Approve or Deny Access Requests guides.

Abbey strives to help you automate and secure access management without being intrusive.

To that end, this Pull Request contains native Terraform HCL code using normal open source Terraform Provider libraries. It represents the permissions change. In this case, it's just a simple creation of a new Terraform Resource.

After approving the request, you should be able to see that the Identity Center User has been added to the Group in the AWS Identity Center console, and that they have an associated AWS Identity Center Permission Set for the account where the assignment was made.

Next Steps

To learn more about what Privacy Policy you can configure, try one of our Step-by-Step Tutorials.

For more information on how Abbey works, visit the Key Concepts or Grant Kits page.

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