What is an IAM Policy?

An IAM policy is a document with a set of rules. Each IAM policy grants a specific set of permissions.

Policies are attached to IAM identities like Users, Groups, and Roles. Each IAM policy has a unique name.

There are two types of policies in your AWS account:

Managed policies: These policies can be reused and attached to multiple entities. AWS provides a lot of managed policies by default. Customers can also create their own managed policies.

Inline policies: These policies are applied directly to IAM entities. However, these policies are not reusable and cannot be attached to multiple entities.