Single Sign-On to Amazon Redshift from Tableau Using IAM Identity Center

This blog post is co-written with Sid Wray and Jake Koskela from Salesforce, and Adiascar Cisneros from Tableau. Amazon Redshift is a fast, scalable cloud data warehouse built to serve workloads at any scale. With Amazon Redshift as your data warehouse, you can run complex queries using sophisticated query optimization to quickly deliver results to Tableau, which offers a comprehensive set of capabilities and connectivity options for analysts to efficiently prepare, discover, and share insights across the enterprise. For customers who want to integrate Amazon Redshift with Tableau using single sign-on capabilities, we introduced AWS IAM Identity Center integration to seamlessly implement authentication and authorization.

Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse service that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze all your data using standard SQL and advanced analytics capabilities. It’s designed to handle massive volumes of structured and semi-structured data, and it scales up or down quickly to meet your changing needs.

With Amazon Redshift as your data warehouse, you can run complex queries using sophisticated query optimization to quickly deliver results to Tableau, which offers a comprehensive set of capabilities and connectivity options for analysts to efficiently prepare, discover, and share insights across the enterprise. For customers who want to integrate Amazon Redshift with Tableau using single sign-on capabilities, we introduced AWS IAM Identity Center integration to seamlessly implement authentication and authorization.

IAM Identity Center provides capabilities to centrally manage single sign-on access to AWS accounts and applications. Redshift now integrates with IAM Identity Center, and supports trusted identity propagation, making it possible to integrate with third-party identity providers (IdP) such as Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD), Okta, Ping, and OneLogin. This integration positions Amazon Redshift as an IAM Identity Center-managed application, enabling you to use database role-based access control on your data warehouse for enhanced security. Role-based access control allows you to apply fine grained access control using row level, column level, and dynamic data masking in your data warehouse.

AWS and Tableau have collaborated to enable single sign-on support for accessing Amazon Redshift from Tableau. Tableau now supports single sign-on capabilities with Amazon Redshift connector to simplify the authentication and authorization. The Tableau Desktop 2024.1 and Tableau Server 2023.3.4 releases support trusted identity propagation with IAM Identity Center. This allows users to seamlessly access Amazon Redshift data within Tableau using their external IdP credentials without needing to specify AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles in Tableau. This single sign-on integration is available for Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, and Tableau Prep.

In this post, we outline a comprehensive guide for setting up single sign-on to Amazon Redshift using integration with IAM Identity Center and Okta as the IdP. By following this guide, you’ll learn how to enable seamless single sign-on authentication to Amazon Redshift data sources directly from within Tableau Desktop, streamlining your analytics workflows and enhancing security.

Prerequisites

Before you begin implementing the solution, make sure that you have the following in place:

Walkthrough

In this walkthrough, you build the solution with following steps:

Set up the Okta OIDC application

To create an OIDC web app in Okta, follow the instructions in this video, or use the following steps to create the wep app in Okta admin console:

Note: The Tableau Desktop redirect URLs should always use localhost. The examples below also use localhost for the Tableau Server hostname for ease of testing in a test environment. For this setup, you should also access the server at localhost in the browser. If you decide to use localhost for early testing, you will also need to configure the gateway to accept localhost using this tsm command:

In a production environment, or Tableau Cloud, you should use the full hostname that your users will access Tableau on the web, along with https. If you already have an environment with https configured, you may skip the localhost configuration and use the full hostname from the start.

Set up the Okta authorization server

Okta allows you to create multiple custom authorization servers that you can use to protect your own resource servers. Within each authorization server you can define your own OAuth 2.0 scopes, claims, and access policies. If you have an Okta Developer Edition account, you already have a custom authorization server created for you called default.

For this blog post, we use the default custom authorization server. If your application has requirements such as requiring more scopes, customizing rules for when to grant scopes, or you need more authorization servers with different scopes and claims, then you can follow this guide.

Set up the Okta claims

Tokens contain claims that are statements about the subject (for example: name, role, or email address). For this example, we use the default custom claim sub. Follow this guide to create claims.

Setup the Okta access policies and rules

Access policies are containers for rules. Each access policy applies to a particular OpenID Connect application. The rules that the policy contains define different access and refresh token lifetimes depending on the nature of the token request. In this example, you create a simple policy for all clients as shown in Figure 7 that follows. Follow this guide to create access policies and rules.

Rules for access policies define token lifetimes for a given combination of grant type, user, and scope. They’re evaluated in priority order and after a matching rule is found, no other rules are evaluated. If no matching rule is found, then the authorization request fails. This example uses the role depicted in Figure 8 that follows. Follow this