Amazon Web Services (AWS) has recently unveiled a new web identity
service that is fully compatible with web giants like Google and Facebook and
its own AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).
This new service will allow its coveted developers to grant authorization
for a temporary period of time to people who will be using these three
services. It will also help to simplify the development process as all the
Identity Management for now of course is done by AWS itself.
This newly developed app can manage all the server-side code without any
long time credentials. That’s not all; the service is also introducing a new
AWS Security Token Service (STS) API, which allows for temporary identity
security credentials for the users who have been authenticated by Google,
Amazon or Facebook.
AWS’s
official blog recently published a new post acknowledging the launch of this
new service. In its blog post AWS said, “The
app can then use the temporary security credentials to access AWS resources
such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) objects, DynamoDB tables, or Amazon
Simple Queue Service queues.”
So
from now on with the help of this new service that AWS is offering app
developers will be able to integrate identity features into their own app more
easily. Eventually the end users are allowed to upload an image file as their
own avatar to get started using apps on their devices. The developers would
save and store those images as designated objects into a bucket of Amazon S3
storage. In order to enable this all the developers need to integrate an
especial role that has two different parts all together.
The
first role is specifying a trust service or a trusted entity (principal). In
this case, the trusted entity belongs to any authenticated Amazon.com user,
while the second role is accessing the main policy that provides all the
specifications of what a user is allowed to do.
It
has to be added here that AWS previously launched its own identity service at
its re:Invent conference, which took place in
late last year, and now the company is putting a strong emphasis on it.
One of the most highlighting factors of it is it allows for identity
federation between the AWS services and customer’s corporate directory.
In
the current times people use Facebook and Google frequently for all the identity
purposes, as these two are the current identity kings of the world for sure.
The usage of these two is far more than the use of a retail account of
Amazon.com. Now the question is where is the support for Twitter and LinkedIn?
The blog post didn’t provide any explanations on this matter, though we can
predict that more services are on the carts, and that will be added soon
enough. We shouldn’t forget that recently Amazon expanded ‘Appstore for Android’ to 200 countries for better results.
Nowadays
identity has become breathtakingly crucial, and thus the need for third-party
identity providers is increasing with the everyday passing by. Some of these 3rd
party service providers are Ping Identity, Forever, Phil Windley’s company etc.
Forever is owned by Kynetx, and it allows its users to take full control over
their own personal information. On the other hand Windley’s company provides context-aware
apps that can easily run on the devices like mobile phones, desktops, and
browsers.
There
are a few more third-party services too that are easily available in the market
such as JanRain, which have recently emerged by serving as identity brokers.
Some enterprise app providers like Okta and Symplified are SaaS providers that
also support Identity services. Recently a few other companies have also
entered in the Identity marketplace after considering the potentiality and
future of this market.
