Create IAM resources with CloudFormation
AWS Identity and Access Management is integrated with AWS CloudFormation, a service that helps you to model and set up your AWS resources so that you can spend less time creating and managing your resources and infrastructure. You create a template that describes all the AWS resources that you want (such as access keys, groups, group policies, instance profiles, managed policies, OIDC providers, inline policies, roles, role policies, SAML providers, server certificates, service-linked roles, users (and adding users to groups), user policies, and virtual MFA devices), and CloudFormation provisions and configures those resources for you.
When you use CloudFormation, you can reuse your template to set up your IAM resources consistently and repeatedly. Describe your resources once, and then provision the same resources over and over in multiple AWS accounts and Regions.
IAM and CloudFormation templates
To provision and configure resources for IAM and related services, you must understand CloudFormation templates. Templates are formatted text files in JSON or YAML. These templates describe the resources that you want to provision in your CloudFormation stacks. If you're unfamiliar with JSON or YAML, you can use CloudFormation Designer to help you get started with CloudFormation templates. For more information, see What is CloudFormation Designer? in the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.
IAM supports creating access keys, groups, group policies, instance profiles, managed policies, OIDC providers, inline policies, roles, role policies, SAML providers, server certificates, service-linked roles, users (and adding users to groups), user policies, and virtual MFA devices in CloudFormation. For more information, including examples of JSON and YAML templates for IAM resources, see the AWS Identity and Access Management resource type reference in the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.
You can also create templates that create related resources, such as roles and managed policies.
Learn more about CloudFormation
To learn more about CloudFormation, see the following resources:
