What are IAM best practices?
Use roles on EC2 (not access keys), follow least privilege (custom policies, not broad managed ones), enable MFA for all users, rotate access keys every 90 days, don't use the root account, use groups for user permissions, use IAM Access Analyzer to find unintended access, and audit regularly.
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IAM (Identity and Access Management) controls who can access your AWS resources. It manages users (long-lived credentials), roles (temporary credentials for EC2/Lambda), groups (collections of users), and policies (JSON documents defining permissions).
Always use IAM roles for EC2. Roles provide temporary credentials that rotate automatically no access keys in .env. The AWS SDK on EC2 automatically uses the attached role's credentials. IAM users with access keys are for CLI access from your laptop or applications outside AWS.
Least privilege means granting only the minimum permissions needed. Instead of AmazonSESFullAccess (which allows everything), create a custom policy that only allows ses:SendEmail from your specific domain. This limits damage if credentials are compromised.
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