The Many Ways to Manage Access to an EC2 Instance
Getting to the right balance of security and convenience is a game of tradeoffs. So it is with managing access to EC2 instances. Stricter security can lead to friction for engineers as they deploy and manage the applications they’re responsible for. More lenient security prioritizes speed, but correlates with a higher risk of exploits.
The way you approach access management is as important for your administrators as it is for your developers. Rolling out a complex access management solution increases the cognitive load on administrators. Complexity causes people to make mistakes and overlook vulnerabilities. An access management system must be easy for developers to quickly navigate, hard for hackers to exploit, and reasonable for administrators to administer.
The goal of this article is to explore EC2 access management strategies that offer different tradeoffs on the security and convenience curve.
