terraforming VS saml2aws

Terraforming

I would also strongly recommend an iterative triage process: don't feel that you need to solve everything all once. It's a huge amount of progress if you can get to a stage where you understand the relationships between services, have enough monitoring to identify failures, and can iteratively move services to more granular IAM policies even if it's all still running in one big account. Simply using a tool like terraformer or terraforming to move the manual configuration into an IaC workflow is an accomplishment, especially since it helps you both make changes more confidently and identify where new changes are still being made. Depending on the politics, that last part might be important: you'll be unpopular if you take away everyone's rights but you'll probably have better luck first nudging people to make them using a sensible flow rather than by hand.

Haven't tried this but if I ever find myself in your situation I'll give it a spin https://github.com/dtan4/terraforming

There are a couple of tools to automate creating terraform configuration and prepopulate state from existing resources, like terraforming, terraformer or cf-terraforming. But it is still cumbersome and laborious and in my experience, it's usually way easier to just recreate everything within terraform from scratch wherever that's possible.

🧪 Terraforming export existing AWS resources to Terraform style (tf, tfstate).

related: message on saml2aws repo

If you have an external identity provider, you can add a SAML provider in IAM and use saml2aws locally. The session duration can be configured on the role.

Or if you have an existing IdP you can use https://github.com/Versent/saml2aws and https://github.com/makethunder/awsudo. By setting up a central account that you put in your trust policy which users can assume roles.

In my company everything goes through Active Directory and we use saml2aws [1] to generate credentials with two factor involved. It works quite well for us. We even use this for our artists to create local builds of our games since we keep all important secrets and such in aws secrets mananger. We scope access to said secrets with custom roles and tags.

[1] https://github.com/Versent/saml2aws

Technically I guess it should be possible with something like saml2aws, but it doesn't support AWS as an IdP yet.

saml2aws-multi is a simple tool I created for using saml2aws more effectively on day-to-day tasks. saml2aws-multi provides an easy-to-use command line interface to support login and retrieve AWS temporary credentials for multiple roles of different accounts with saml2aws.