Exploring the AWS policy types

There are more than a few policy objects available within AWS. Every request and action within an AWS account is evaluated against these policies at execution time. Since that is a lot of moving parts determining permissions, let's take a look at the six major policy types and how they are used.

Identity-based policies

Identity-based policies are the policies that determine what an identity object can do. These policies are JSON documents that spell out the user, group, or role that can perform the action, the resources that those actions can be performed on, and the conditions under which those actions are valid. These identity-based policies are better understood by some further categorization into three additional policy types, which we will now explore in greater detail.

AWS managed policies

AWS IAM comes prepopulated with several hundred policy objects. They are not natively used in a new AWS account; they are simply available for...