AWS IAM vs Oathkeeper

Overview

AWS IAM

Stacks1.2K

Followers819

Votes26

Oathkeeper

Stacks4

Followers14

Votes0

GitHub Stars3.5K

Forks386

AWS IAM vs Oathkeeper: What are the differences?

# Key Differences between AWS IAM and Oathkeeper

IAM (Identity and Access Management) on AWS is a service that helps manage user identities and their access to resources within the AWS platform. Unlike Oathkeeper, which is an open-source, cloud-native project that provides identity and access control for microservices and APIs. 

1. **Scope of Control**: AWS IAM is limited to managing access within the AWS cloud platform, while Oathkeeper can be used in a broader context, including hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Oathkeeper's flexibility allows organizations to centralize their access control policies across different cloud providers and on-premises systems. 

2. **Integration Flexibility**: AWS IAM is deeply integrated with various AWS services, providing seamless access control within the AWS ecosystem. On the other hand, Oathkeeper is designed to be cloud provider agnostic, allowing it to integrate with multiple cloud providers and third-party services. This makes Oathkeeper more versatile in a diverse IT environment.

3. **Granularity of Policy Control**: While both AWS IAM and Oathkeeper offer policy-based access control, Oathkeeper provides finer-grained control over access policies at the API level. This granularity allows organizations to enforce specific access rules for individual APIs, enhancing security and compliance measures compared to AWS IAM.

4. **Authenticatio**n**: AWS IAM primarily relies on AWS's authentication mechanisms, such as access keys, IAM users, and roles. On the other hand, Oathkeeper supports various authentication methods, including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and custom authentication solutions. This gives organizations more flexibility in implementing secure authentication mechanisms for their services.

5. **Community Support and Customization**: Oathkeeper being an open-source project benefits from a robust community that contributes to its development and maintenance. This community support allows for more customization options and the ability to address specific use cases that may not be natively supported by AWS IAM.

6. **Cost and Pricing Model**: AWS IAM is a managed service provided by AWS, and its pricing is based on usage and the number of users and roles created. In contrast, Oathkeeper being open-source, provides a cost-effective solution as organizations do not incur licensing fees or costs associated with proprietary software. This can result in significant cost savings for organizations, especially those with large-scale deployments.

In Summary, AWS IAM and Oathkeeper differ in scope, integration flexibility, granularity of policy control, authentication methods, community support, and cost implications.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

AWS IAM	Oathkeeper
It enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely. Using IAM, you can create and manage AWS users and groups, and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources.	A cloud native Identity & Access Proxy (IAP) which authenticates and authorizes incoming HTTP requests. Inspired by the BeyondCorp / Zero Trust white paper. Written in Go.
Manage IAM users and their access - You can create users in IAM, assign them individual security credentials (i.e., access keys, passwords, and Multi-Factor Authentication devices) or request temporary security credentials to provide users access to AWS services and resources.;Manage IAM roles and their permissions - You can create roles in IAM, and manage permissions to control which operations can be performed by the entity, or AWS service, that assumes the role. You can also define which entity is allowed to assume the role.;Manage federated users and their permissions - You can enable identity federation to allow existing identities (e.g. users) from your corporate directory or from a 3rd party such as Login with Amazon, Facebook, and Google to access the AWS Management Console, to call AWS APIs, and to access resources, without the need to create an IAM user for each identity.	Identify the user and provide the user session to API backends; Restrict access to certain resources based on a set of rules; Transform access credentials (e.g. OAuth2 Access Tokens, SAML Assertions, ...) to a format (e.g. JSON Web Token, Plaintext, Basic Authorization, ...) consumable by your API services
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 3.5K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 386
Stacks 1.2K	Stacks 4
Followers 819	Followers 14
Votes 26	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 23 Centralized powerful permissions based access 3 Straightforward SSO integration Cons 1 No equivalent for on-premise networks, must adapt to AD 1 Cloud auth limited to resources, no apps or services	No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to AWS IAM, Oathkeeper?

Identity Management Simplified

Keycloak Enterprise-grade identity & access management, fully managed! Enable user authentication and authorization in minutes, so you can keep growing.

Teleport

Teleport makes it easy for users to securely access infrastructure and meet the toughest compliance requirements. Teleport replaces shared credentials with short-lived certificates and is completely transparent to client-side tools.

HashiCorp Boundary

Simple and secure remote access — to any system anywhere based on trusted identity. It enables practitioners and operators to securely access dynamic hosts and services with fine-grained authorization without requiring direct network access.

SailPoint

It provides enterprise identity governance solutions with on-premises and cloud-based identity management software for the most complex challenges.

AWS Service Catalog

AWS Service Catalog allows IT administrators to create, manage, and distribute catalogs of approved products to end users, who can then access the products they need in a personalized portal. Administrators can control which users have access to each application or AWS resource to enforce compliance with organizational business policies. AWS Service Catalog allows your organization to benefit from increased agility and reduced costs because end users can find and launch only the products they need from a catalog that you control.

Infra

It enables you to discover and access infrastructure (e.g. Kubernetes, databases). We help you connect an identity provider such as Okta or Azure active directory, and map users/groups with the permissions you set to your infrastructure.

BeyondTrust

It supports a family of privileged identity management, privileged remote access, and vulnerability management products for UNIX, Linux, Windows and Mac OS operating systems.

GCP IAM

It lets you create and manage permissions for Google Cloud resources. IAM unifies access control for Google Cloud services into a single system and presents a consistent set of operations.

Key Vault Access Policy

It determines whether a given service principal, namely an application or user group, can perform different operations on Key Vault secrets, keys, and certificates. You can assign access policies using the Azure portal, the Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell.

ManageEngine PAM360

It empowers enterprises looking to stay ahead of this growing risk with a robust privileged access management (PAM) program that ensures no privileged access pathway to mission-critical assets is left unmanaged, unknown, or unmonitored.

Related Comparisons

AWS IAM vs Oathkeeper: What are the differences?

# Key Differences between AWS IAM and Oathkeeper

IAM (Identity and Access Management) on AWS is a service that helps manage user identities and their access to resources within the AWS platform. Unlike Oathkeeper, which is an open-source, cloud-native project that provides identity and access control for microservices and APIs. 

1. **Scope of Control**: AWS IAM is limited to managing access within the AWS cloud platform, while Oathkeeper can be used in a broader context, including hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Oathkeeper's flexibility allows organizations to centralize their access control policies across different cloud providers and on-premises systems. 

2. **Integration Flexibility**: AWS IAM is deeply integrated with various AWS services, providing seamless access control within the AWS ecosystem. On the other hand, Oathkeeper is designed to be cloud provider agnostic, allowing it to integrate with multiple cloud providers and third-party services. This makes Oathkeeper more versatile in a diverse IT environment.

3. **Granularity of Policy Control**: While both AWS IAM and Oathkeeper offer policy-based access control, Oathkeeper provides finer-grained control over access policies at the API level. This granularity allows organizations to enforce specific access rules for individual APIs, enhancing security and compliance measures compared to AWS IAM.

4. **Authenticatio**n**: AWS IAM primarily relies on AWS's authentication mechanisms, such as access keys, IAM users, and roles. On the other hand, Oathkeeper supports various authentication methods, including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and custom authentication solutions. This gives organizations more flexibility in implementing secure authentication mechanisms for their services.

5. **Community Support and Customization**: Oathkeeper being an open-source project benefits from a robust community that contributes to its development and maintenance. This community support allows for more customization options and the ability to address specific use cases that may not be natively supported by AWS IAM.

6. **Cost and Pricing Model**: AWS IAM is a managed service provided by AWS, and its pricing is based on usage and the number of users and roles created. In contrast, Oathkeeper being open-source, provides a cost-effective solution as organizations do not incur licensing fees or costs associated with proprietary software. This can result in significant cost savings for organizations, especially those with large-scale deployments.

In Summary, AWS IAM and Oathkeeper differ in scope, integration flexibility, granularity of policy control, authentication methods, community support, and cost implications.

AWS IAM vs Oathkeeper

Overview