I am so excited to be writing to you today. I just joined the IAM Pulse team as our first Cloud IAM Advocate! My role is an incredibly fun one:

Build secure cloud services and then release the instructions to you for free!

Listen to your ideas about how to use IAM and the creative ways you're solving cloud security in your industries

As many of you know, IAM, or Identity and Access Management, 

 cloud security - they're equivalent terms. Despite the central role of IAM in securing cloud services, it's often treated as a secondary consideration. A sort of, "Once this service is built, 

 you want to secure it properly, you should next think about IAM". The public cloud is amazing, but no service is immune to security problems, and thinking about security as something you do last is a sure-fire way to secure something poorly.

We know cloud security is critically important to every business in every vertical, so our goal at IAM Pulse is to elevate IAM to its own practice. Cloud security shouldn't be seen as a bolt-on, it should be a secure foundation that we build from.

My background is in operations and DevOps in almost every discipline. I've built large Windows domains, constructed call centers, secured enterprise manufacturing and healthcare, executed digital and physical penetration testing, spun up DevOps for applications and infrastructure, and even worked with the US Department of State to build secure solutions in the cloud.

Security is never an optional step. It is absolutely critical to the success and CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability) of every network and application I've ever interacted with.

I hope you're nodding along with me! And if you are, you can help us push the state of cloud security forward. As you build secure solutions in the cloud, 

please share your best practices, clever hacks, and novel solutions with me at 

 We would be absolutely thrilled to publish your bright ideas, and elevate you and security to new heights.

You can find me in dozens of places on the web - I keep a directory at 

 or you can reach me at IAM Pulse at kyler.middleton@iampulse.com.

The IAM community is big and amazing, but fragmented because the industry thinks of IAM only within service or resource verticals. We want to help the industry realize IAM is a single discipline. Let's do this.

 to hear more from me - I'm diving into multi-cloud K8s, dynamic IAM based on Terraform reads at compile time, and building a library of IAM security best practices for all of AWS's resources and services. It's going to be awesome.

Kyler Middleton
Cloud IAM Advocate
IAM Pulse

Hello World - Joining the Team as a Cloud IAM Advocate

As a cloud professional, we know you have a lot of thoughts about IAM – good and bad, we get it! Take this brief survey to help guide our focus areas, and we’ll donate $5 to Hack the Hood for your effort.

Closing out the calendar year means wrapping up the last of your todos, while wrapping up the last of your gifts to the family. If you’re like me, you’re racing against time in both cases – let’s just hope the quality of your todos beats the quality of my gift wrapping (read as: poor).

The change of the calendar is also an opportunity to both reflect on the past year (with mostly disdain) and look ahead to the new year (with mostly hope). We’ve learned an immense amount as a team with just a few months of community and content building behind us, and we’re most certainly looking ahead to a helpful and fruitful year.

Our mission is to make IAM simple and accessible for everyone. We’re doing so by finally giving IAM the attention it deserves. If you carry any responsibility for cloud environments – whether AWS, GCP, or Azure – you’ve undoubtedly encountered IAM. And my bet is that you have… thoughts.

We'd love for you to share those thoughts by following this brief survey. It should only take 15-20 minutes, and for every complete submission, 

. That may not sound like a lot, but 1,000 surveys is $5,000 – so take part and then tell all your (fellow cloud) friends!

 is an award-winning non-profit whose mission is to empower low-income youth of color with the knowledge, skills, and relationships they need to pursue careers in tech. Hack the Hood’s core program, “Bootcamp,” teaches coding, design, and 21st century workplace skills to youth ages 16-24 while they build websites for real small business clients.

Take the 2022 Cloud IAM Survey

‘Tis the time of year to spread holiday cheer!

Please consider taking part in some charitable fun!


Share what you’ve learned or mastered in IAM

Whether a puzzling challenge, an ‘a ha!’ moment, or a policy gem.

Putting knowledge into practice is the key.


So capture your thoughts, reflections, and musings

If you need ideas, we’ve got great member content for perusing.

Then pick one of five stellar charities and $100 will be disbursed!


We’ll spotlight each of the five on social media this week

From expanding career pathways to empowering girls in STEM - take a peek.


We’ll also send you some swag, a special First 100 Authors box

Filled with clever, useful goodies (sorry, no Crocs).


We hope you’ll take part in this holiday campaign

Before you fully unwind and pop that champagne!



IAM Spotlighting Five Fantastic Charities

As a startup within Okta’s incubation program, OktaX, our IAM Pulse Team selected these fantastic organizations who are also 

 invests in entrepreneurs who are using technology to accelerate social impact. Fast Forward’s investments span beyond philanthropic funding, through products and programs that bridge the tech and nonprofit sectors to build capacity for tech nonprofits.

 re-engineers the way BIPOC girls from marginalized communities experience STEM by catalyzing out-of-school time (OST) STEM educators and STEM professionals into equity educators and advocates through training and curricula that promote access, belonging and persistence.

 trains and mentors Black male youth in technology creation, entrepreneurship, and leadership skills to transform their lives and communities.

 is increasing the number of low-income, first-generation, and historically under-represented students who graduate from college. In partnership with high schools and colleges, Beyond 12’s technology platform and coaches together provide students with the academic, social, and emotional support they need to succeed in higher education and in life.

 provides pathways to career success for high school students in underserved communities through skills training, meaningful work experiences, and impactful relationships.

Share your IAM knowledge and we'll donate $100 to a great cause 

IAM in the Holiday Spirit

Amazon Web Services

Cloud Providers

AWS IAM: The challenge

Kubernetes

Technical Themes

Controlling AWS EKS Access Using AWS IAM And Kubernetes RBAC

Google Cloud Platform

Serverless

Impersonate the Cloud: Running your app locally as if you were on Google Cloud

Get Email Notification On AWS IAM User Creation

AWS 1x1 - Identity and Access Management

Terraform

Code Frameworks

Open Source

Terraform Dynamic IAM Policy Construction

AWS IAM Deep Dive Chapter 2: Users, Groups, Roles, Policies

The 2 limits of Google Cloud IAM

Advancing your Security with Permissions Boundaries

AWS CDK

AWS temporary creds with SSO and a CDK workaround

AWS Cloud Delivery Kit. Define cloud infrastructure using familiar programming languages.

AWS CloudFormation gives you an easy way to model a collection of related AWS and third-party resources, provision them quickly and consistently, and manage them throughout their lifecycles, by treating infrastructure as code. A CloudFormation template describes your desired resources and their dependencies so you can launch and configure them together as a stack.

AWS CloudFormation

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and control the cryptographic keys that are used to protect your data. 

AWS KMS

Cloud Services

AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. You can trigger Lambda from over 200 AWS services and software as a service (SaaS) applications, and only pay for what you use.

AWS Lambda

AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect secrets needed to access your applications, services, and IT resources. The service enables you to easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle.

AWS Secrets Manager

Active Directory is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. It is included in most Windows Server operating systems as a set of processes and services. Initially, Active Directory was used only for centralized domain management

Active Directory

Identity Providers

Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.

Amazon API Gateway

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability.

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.

Amazon EC2

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications.

Amazon SQS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows.

Ansible

CIS Benchmarks are best practices for the secure configuration of a target system. Available for more than 100 CIS Benchmarks across 25+ vendor product families, CIS Benchmarks are developed through a unique consensus-based process comprised of cybersecurity professionals and subject matter experts around the world.

CIS Benchmarks

Compliance Guidelines

Chef is a company and the name of a configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. It uses a pure-Ruby, domain-specific language for writing system configuration recipes.

Chef

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program is a US government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.

FedRAMP

Google Cloud Platform, offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, file storage, and YouTube.

Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol network.

LDAP

Microsoft Azure, commonly referred to as Azure, is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers.

Microsoft Azure

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is a physical sciences laboratory and non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce. Its mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness.

NIST

The Open Web Application Security Project is an online community that produces freely-available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the field of web application security.

OWASP

Okta, Inc. is a publicly traded identity and access management company based in San Francisco. It provides cloud software that helps companies manage and secure user authentication into applications, and for developers to build identity controls into applications, website web services and devices.

Okta

Open-source software is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative public manner. 

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is an information security standard for organizations that handle branded credit cards from the major card schemes. The PCI Standard is mandated by the card brands but administered by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council.

PCI-DSS

Pulumi's open source infrastructure as code SDK enables you to create, deploy, and manage infrastructure on any cloud, using your favorite languages.

Pulumi

Puppet is a software configuration management tool which includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. It is a model-driven solution that requires limited programming knowledge to use. Related: See Chef, SaltStack, Ansible.

Puppet

SOC 2 is an auditing procedure that ensures your service providers securely manage your data to protect the interests of your organization and the privacy of its clients. For security-conscious businesses, SOC 2 compliance is a minimal requirement when considering a SaaS provider.

SOC 2

Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand, taking care of the servers on behalf of their customers.

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool created by HashiCorp. Users define and provide data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), or optionally JSON.

The zero trust security model, sometimes known as perimeterless security, describes an approach to the design and implementation of IT systems.

IAMTHEREFOREI THINK?

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