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Authenticating with identities in AWS Application Migration Service

Authentication is how you sign in to AWS using your identity credentials. You must be authenticated as the AWS account root user, an IAM user, or by assuming an IAM role.

You can sign in as a federated identity using credentials from an identity source like AWS IAM Identity Center (IAM Identity Center), single sign-on authentication, or Google/Facebook credentials. For more information about signing in, see How to sign in to your AWS account in the AWS Sign-In User Guide.

For programmatic access, AWS provides an SDK and CLI to cryptographically sign requests. For more information, see AWS Signature Version 4 for API requests in the IAM User Guide.

AWS account root user

When you create an AWS account, you begin with one sign-in identity called the AWS account root user that has complete access to all AWS services and resources. We strongly recommend that you don't use the root user for everyday tasks. For tasks that require root user credentials, see Tasks that require root user credentials in the IAM User Guide.

IAM users and groups

An IAM user is an identity with specific permissions for a single person or application. We recommend using temporary credentials instead of IAM users with long-term credentials. For more information, see Require human users to use federation with an identity provider to access AWS using temporary credentials in the IAM User Guide.

An IAM group specifies a collection of IAM users and makes permissions easier to manage for large sets of users. For more information, see Use cases for IAM users in the IAM User Guide.

IAM roles

An IAM role is an identity with specific permissions that provides temporary credentials. You can assume a role by switching from a user to an IAM role (console) or by calling an AWS CLI or AWS API operation. For more information, see Methods to assume a role in the IAM User Guide.

IAM roles are useful for federated user access, temporary IAM user permissions, cross-account access, cross-service access, and applications running on Amazon EC2. For more information, see Cross account resource access in IAM in the IAM User Guide.