Testing AWS services using Access Key authentication
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer a fantastic range of established cloud-based services. Being one of the most mature CSPs, they offer various ways to authenticate and access their web services. The main ways being:
Access Keys: Used to sign requests for REST, Query API, and AWS SDKX.509 Certificates: Used to sign SOAP requests
However, these days AWS seem to be consolidating around the Access Key approach and are deprecating SOAP usage across most of the estate, for example, SimpleDB did in September 2011. EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) deprecated SOAP access after December 2014 (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-soap-api.html). In this recipe, we take a look at how we use Access keys to make a signed REST request to the Identity and Access Management (IAM) API to list all users. While this isn't the most exciting API to pick, there is less setup involved than with, for example, a SimpleDB query and the same approach...
