AWS IAM Identity Center is a service for integrating authentication and authorization in a common way across your AWS footprint. It can also function as a single sign-on provider, but we will set that aside here.
You can use Identity Center either with an external identity provider (IdP) like Okta, Ping, OneLogin, and ActiveDirectory (replacing SAML federation with STS), or with an Identity Center-managed identity store (replacing IAM users).
Note that only the AWS CLI v2 supports signing in to Identity Center; installation docs are here.
AWS IAM Identity Center was formerly called AWS SSO, so you will see "SSO" featured in many field names in configuration and APIs.
There is an Identity Center instance; currently, only one instance is allowed, but this seems likely to change in the future (the API is ListInstances). An Identity Center instance is associated with an identity store, and has two identifiers: an instance ARN, which is used by administrators, and a start URL, which is the entry point for signing in, and the identifier used by users. An instance exists in a particular AWS region, and this region must be known by users as it is needed as part of the sign-in process.
Adminstrators create permission sets; each permission set is a collection of IAM policies (currently, AWS managed policies and a single inline policy).
Administrators create assignments; each assignment is the combination of a principal (a user or group from the IdP), a permission set, and a target (an AWS account). A assignment means that principal is entitled use those permissions within that account. An assignment is provisioned into an Identity Center-managed IAM role in that account.
Users interact with "role names", using familiar terminology, but these are in fact permission set names. The provisioned IAM roles use mangled names that are not shown to users.
When a user signs in, they first authenticate with Identity Center, which, if it is configured to use an external IdP, involves a redirection to the IdP. This authentication results in an OAuth access token that represents the user's session. Note that this is not AWS credentials, because the user may have access to many accounts and roles (provisioned permission sets), but they only need to sign in once.
The sign-in always happens through the browser, so it can leverage your existing session with your external IdP.
If you use aws sso login, aws-sso-util login, or aws_sso_lib.login(), these will all re-used a cached token if they find one, or pop up a browser if they do not have a valid cached token, which will then prompt you to sign in only if your session with your IdP has expired.
The browser sign-in flow will, however, always prompt you to approve releasing the token to the CLI or script that triggered the sign-in process.
When using the AWS CLI and aws-sso-util/aws-sso-lib, this token is cached in ~/.aws/sso/cache.
Subsequently, this OAuth access token can be used to determine the user's access, and to get AWS credentials for a specific account and role (i.e., an IAM role provisioned for a permission set).
This is mainly done by configuring profiles in ~/.aws/config.
Each profile specifies the account and Identity Center role to use.
A profile configured for Identity Center looks like this:
[profile my-sso-profile]
sso_start_url = https://example.awsapps.com/start
sso_region = us-east-1 # the region Identity Center is configured in
sso_account_id = 123456789012
sso_role_name = MyRoleName
region = us-east-2 # the region to use for AWS API callsThe AWS CLI and (most) SDKs automatically load the cached access token and use it to retrieve AWS credentials for that account and role (including refreshing the AWS credentials if they expire but the access token is still valid). These profiles can be written manually, or using aws configure sso or aws-sso-util configure, which set up these profiles for you.
The access token can also be used to enumerate the accounts and roles the token (i.e., the user) has access to. This is used by aws-sso-util roles, and is used by aws configure sso for auto-complete and by aws-sso-util configure populate to create profiles for every account and role.
Programmatic access in Python for an account and role using the cached token is available with aws_sso_lib.get_boto3_session().
Administering Identity Center is done through the sso-admin and identitystore APIs, which are accessed using AWS credentials.
Note that a) these APIs cannot be used directly with the OAuth access token resulting from signing in, and b) the AWS credentials used to access them do not need to come from a role linked to Identity Center (otherwise, how would you set it up?).