What is the primary purpose of AWS IAM?

The primary purpose of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is to control access to AWS resources. IAM enables you to create and manage AWS users and groups and set permissions for them. This means you can specify who can access which resources, what actions they can perform on those resources, and under what conditions.

By implementing IAM, organizations can enhance security by granting the least privilege access. This principle ensures that users or services only have access to the resources they absolutely need, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access or misuse of resources. Furthermore, IAM supports multifactor authentication, enabling extra layers of security for user identities.

While managing EC2 instances, storing S3 data, or deploying applications are important tasks within the AWS ecosystem, they are secondary functions that rely on IAM's ability to control who can perform these actions. IAM serves as a fundamental service that underpins the security and management of AWS cloud resources.