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Ma Diga
Asked: 2013-08-08 19:22:03 +0800 CST

User management strategy on AWS

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I'd like to know some ways that is being used to manage shell accounts on EC2 instances. Specially when it grows into a large environment? Just having ec2-user isn't ideal.

There has to be a better way to create new shell accounts, manage and delete across all EC2 instances.

linux

2 Answers

  1. The two approaches most people take:

    • Configuration management tools (e.g. Puppet, Chef, others) to sync accounts, passwords and SSH keys.
    • Running an LDAP server, and configuring all the other servers to authenticate using it. This is (IMO) more complex, but is the "traditional" way people have managed this for many Unix servers.
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  2. We use puppet. The puppet bootstrap takes place via cloud-init.

    Other alternatives:

    1. Chef
    2. Ansible
    3. Salt

    All of these solutions cover more configuration management than just user accounts. What are you using to manage the rest of your stack?

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