How AWS Well-Architected Tool works with IAM

Before you use IAM to manage access to AWS WA Tool, learn what IAM features are available to use with AWS WA Tool.

To get a high-level view of how AWS WA Tool and other AWS services work with most IAM features, see AWS services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

AWS WA Tool identity-based policies

Supports policy actions: Yes

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Action element of a JSON policy describes the actions that you can use to allow or deny access in a policy. Include actions in a policy to grant permissions to perform the associated operation.

Resource-based policies within AWS WA Tool

Supports resource-based policies: No

Resource-based policies are JSON policy documents that you attach to a resource. Examples of resource-based policies are IAM role trust policies and Amazon S3 bucket policies. In services that support resource-based policies, service administrators can use them to control access to a specific resource. For the resource where the policy is attached, the policy defines what actions a specified principal can perform on that resource and under what conditions. You must specify a principal in a resource-based policy. Principals can include accounts, users, roles, federated users, or AWS services.

To enable cross-account access, you can specify an entire account or IAM entities in another account as the principal in a resource-based policy. For more information, see Cross account resource access in IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Policy actions for AWS WA Tool

Supports policy actions: Yes

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Action element of a JSON policy describes the actions that you can use to allow or deny access in a policy. Include actions in a policy to grant permissions to perform the associated operation.

Policy actions in AWS WA Tool use the following prefix before the action: wellarchitected:. For example, to allow an entity to define a workload, an administrator must attach a policy that allows wellarchitected:CreateWorkload actions. Similarly, to prevent an entity from deleting workloads, an administrator can attach a policy that denies wellarchitected:DeleteWorkload actions. Policy statements must include either an Action or NotAction element. AWS WA Tool defines its own set of actions that describe tasks that you can perform with this service.

To see a list of AWS WA Tool actions, see Actions Defined by AWS Well-Architected Tool in the Service Authorization Reference.

Policy resources

Supports policy resources: Yes

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Resource JSON policy element specifies the object or objects to which the action applies. As a best practice, specify a resource using its Amazon Resource Name (ARN). For actions that don't support resource-level permissions, use a wildcard (*) to indicate that the statement applies to all resources.

"Resource": "*"

To see a list of AWS WA Tool resource types and their ARNs, see Resources defined by AWS Well-Architected Tool in the Service Authorization Reference. To learn with which actions you can specify the ARN of each resource, see Actions defined by AWS Well-Architected Tool.

The AWS WA Tool workload resource has the following ARN:

arn:${Partition}:wellarchitected:${Region}:${Account}:workload/${ResourceId} 

For more information about the format of ARNs, see Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) and AWS Service Namespaces.

The ARN can be found on the Workload properties page for a workload. For example, to specify a specific workload:

"Resource": "arn:aws:wellarchitected:us-west-2:123456789012:workload/11112222333344445555666677778888" 

To specify all workloads that belong to a specific account, use the wildcard (*):

"Resource": "arn:aws:wellarchitected:us-west-2:123456789012:workload/*" 

Some AWS WA Tool actions, such as those for creating and listing workloads, cannot be performed on a specific resource. In those cases, you must use the wildcard (*).

"Resource": "*"

To see a list of AWS WA Tool resource types and their ARNs, see Resources Defined by AWS Well-Architected Tool in the Service Authorization Reference. To learn with which actions you can specify the ARN of each resource, see Actions Defined by AWS Well-Architected Tool.

Policy condition keys for AWS WA Tool

Supports service-specific policy condition keys: Yes

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Condition element specifies when statements execute based on defined criteria. You can create conditional expressions that use condition operators, such as equals or less than, to match the condition in the policy with values in the request. To see all AWS global condition keys, see AWS global condition context keys in the IAM User Guide.

AWS WA Tool provides one service-specific condition key (wellarchitected:JiraProjectKey) and supports using some global condition keys. To see all AWS global condition keys, see AWS Global Condition Context Keys in the Service Authorization Reference.

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Condition element specifies when statements execute based on defined criteria. You can create conditional expressions that use condition operators, such as equals or less than, to match the condition in the policy with values in the request. To see all AWS global condition keys, see AWS global condition context keys in the IAM User Guide.

ACLs in AWS WA Tool

Supports ACLs: No

Access control lists (ACLs) control which principals (account members, users, or roles) have permissions to access a resource. ACLs are similar to resource-based policies, although they do not use the JSON policy document format.

Authorization based on AWS WA Tool tags

Supports ABAC (tags in policies): Yes

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is an authorization strategy that defines permissions based on attributes called tags. You can attach tags to IAM entities and AWS resources, then design ABAC policies to allow operations when the principal's tag matches the tag on the resource.

To control access based on tags, you provide tag information in the condition element of a policy using the aws:ResourceTag/key-name, aws:RequestTag/key-name, or aws:TagKeys condition keys.

If a service supports all three condition keys for every resource type, then the value is Yes for the service. If a service supports all three condition keys for only some resource types, then the value is Partial.

For more information about ABAC, see Define permissions with ABAC authorization in the IAM User Guide. To view a tutorial with steps for setting up ABAC, see Use attribute-based access control (ABAC) in the IAM User Guide.

Using temporary credentials with AWS WA Tool

Supports temporary credentials: Yes

Temporary credentials provide short-term access to AWS resources and are automatically created when you use federation or switch roles. AWS recommends that you dynamically generate temporary credentials instead of using long-term access keys. For more information, see Temporary security credentials in IAM and AWS services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Cross-service principal permissions for AWS WA Tool

Supports forward access sessions (FAS): Yes

Forward access sessions (FAS) use the permissions of the principal calling an AWS service, combined with the requesting AWS service to make requests to downstream services. For policy details when making FAS requests, see Forward access sessions.

Service roles for AWS WA Tool

Supports service roles: No

A service role is an IAM role that a service assumes to perform actions on your behalf. An IAM administrator can create, modify, and delete a service role from within IAM. For more information, see Create a role to delegate permissions to an AWS service in the IAM User Guide.

Service-linked roles for AWS WA Tool

Supports service-linked roles: No

A service-linked role is a type of service role that is linked to an AWS service. The service can assume the role to perform an action on your behalf. Service-linked roles appear in your AWS account and are owned by the service. An IAM administrator can view, but not edit the permissions for service-linked roles.

For details about creating or managing service-linked roles, see AWS services that work with IAM. Find a service in the table that includes a Yes in the Service-linked role column. Choose the Yes link to view the service-linked role documentation for that service.