Which service would you use to manage and authenticate users in AWS?

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the primary service for managing users and permissions in AWS. With IAM, you can create and manage AWS users and groups and set permissions to allow or deny access to AWS resources. It enables fine-grained control over user access, allowing you to implement security best practices by granting the least privilege principle.

IAM is designed specifically for managing permissions and identities within the AWS infrastructure, which makes it suitable for authenticating users who need to access AWS services directly. This means you can control who can log in and what actions they can take based on their assigned permissions.

While other services like AWS Directory Service and AWS Cognito also deal with user management, they serve different purposes. The Directory Service focuses on creating a managed Microsoft Active Directory environment and integrating AWS resources within that context, and is not the go-to for directly managing AWS user permissions. AWS Cognito is aimed at developers who need to add user sign-up and sign-in functionality to their applications, but it primarily focuses on web and mobile app user authentication rather than managing AWS-level permissions and access controls that IAM handles. AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs code in response to events, and it does not provide user management or authentication capabilities.

Therefore, IAM is the