what is IAM? from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/APIReference/welcome.html:
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service for securely controlling access to AWS services. With IAM, you can centrally manage users, security credentials such as access keys, and permissions that control which AWS resources users and applications can access.
each aws account has its own set of users and policies. when you log into the aws website, there's an iam dashboard where you can view/manage all of the account's resources and policies. aws also provides a rest api with all of the same functionality
it's that iam rest api that we implement here for ceph. someday the ceph dashboard might expose this stuff too
$ aws iam create-user --user-name Alice