Can Amazon IAM be used as an authentication method for hosts?

Question

Is it possible to use IAM to manage user accounts for EC2-hosted unix hosts by way of a PAM module similarly to LDAP, NIS, etc...?

My goal is to have a means to centralize host authentication on our EC2 hosts without the overhead of setting up a single sign on solution.

Answer 1

AWS IAM is meant to handle access to AWS resources. You can create new users but the basic authentication which EC2 instances get is via key pairs, which are not the same as IAM users.

You might be able to create a system of your own which manages IAM users and also generates a private and public key for them to be used inside the instances being created (maybe even re-using the keys you get when creating a new user in IAM).

All in all its not really meant to be used that way, as far as I understand.