Compare IAM models, policies, and identity federation across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI.
Last verified: May 2026
Output will appear here...Identity and Access Management implementations differ significantly across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI in their fundamental models, policy languages, and federation capabilities. AWS uses policy documents with explicit Deny/Allow evaluated against principals, Azure uses role definitions with Actions/NotActions assigned at scopes, GCP uses IAM bindings that map members to roles on resources, and OCI uses compartment-based policies with a natural language syntax. This comparison tool helps you understand the mapping between IAM concepts across all four clouds, including roles, policies, identity federation, service accounts, and permission boundaries.
AWS evaluates permissions by combining identity policies, resource policies, SCPs, permission boundaries, and session policies — an action must not be denied by any layer and must be explicitly allowed. Azure RBAC uses additive role assignments at scopes (management group, subscription, resource group, resource) with no explicit deny (NotActions are exclusions, not denies, though deny assignments exist in limited scenarios). GCP binds members to predefined or custom roles on resources, with organization policies providing guardrails. OCI uses a unique verb-based policy language (Allow group X to manage Y in compartment Z) applied at compartment scopes.
AWS uses IAM instance profiles (for EC2) and execution roles (for Lambda, ECS) — there is no separate service account resource. Azure has Managed Identities (system-assigned tied to a resource, user-assigned as standalone resources). GCP has explicit Service Accounts that are both identities and resources, with key files or Workload Identity for authentication. OCI uses Instance Principals (similar to AWS instance profiles) and Dynamic Groups that match resources by compartment or tag. The key trend across all clouds is moving away from long-lived credentials toward identity federation and managed identities.
Your team is designing a multi-cloud landing zone with consistent IAM patterns across AWS, Azure, and GCP. The compare tool surfaces critical differences: AWS supports explicit-deny SCPs at OU level (use for guardrails), Azure uses Conditional Access for similar control (deploy report-only first), GCP uses Organization Policies (boolean and list constraints). The team builds a per-cloud guardrail playbook that uses the most native pattern for each — rather than trying to force one model across all three. Compliance team approves the design 2 weeks faster than the previous attempt that tried to make AWS and Azure 'look the same'.
The compare tool maintains a feature matrix across 30+ IAM dimensions per cloud: policy language, role types (built-in vs custom), permission boundary support, explicit deny support, identity types (users, groups, service accounts, machine identities), federation methods, MFA enforcement options, conditional access support, audit logging granularity, and pricing. Each row shows side-by-side implementation details with notable gotchas.
AWS's explicit-deny-wins evaluation model is the safest. Azure has no native explicit-deny in RBAC (deny assignments exist only in narrow scenarios). GCP and OCI fall in between. If your security model relies on 'this user must NEVER access X', AWS is the only cloud where that's truly enforceable across all permission layers.
Identity federation across all four clouds has converged on OIDC. AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI all support workload identity federation from GitHub Actions, Kubernetes, and other OIDC providers. Build new CI/CD pipelines using federated identity from day one — never store cloud credentials in repo secrets.
Don't try to map IAM concepts 1:1 across clouds. AWS IAM roles and Azure managed identities are SIMILAR but not identical (lifecycle, scope rules, federation differ). The right approach is per-cloud-native: implement AWS the AWS way, Azure the Azure way, with consistent NAMING and TAGGING for cross-cloud audit instead.
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