I always wondered: Why does AWS provide both an ACCESS_KEY_ID and a AWS_SECRET_KEY ?
I could never see any usecase where we could use one key without the other, so why keeping them separate, as opposed to merging them into a unique key ?
1 Answers
They are the functional equivalent of a username and a password. The access key is the username. It serves to identify the user that holds the access key. The secret key is equivalent to the password, it serves to authenticate the identity presented by the access key.
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