The same IAM policy works perfectly in my test environment.
Once deployed to production, access starts failing without any obvious policy changes.
I’m trying to understand why permissions behave differently and how to troubleshoot this safely.
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The same IAM policy works perfectly in my test environment.
Once deployed to production, access starts failing without any obvious policy changes.
I’m trying to understand why permissions behave differently and how to troubleshoot this safely.
Production environments often include additional constraints that don’t exist in testing. These can include organization-level policies, stricter role boundaries, permission boundaries, or resource conditions that silently restrict access.
Another common issue is that production resources may have different naming patterns or ARNs, causing policies that rely on exact matches to fail. In some cases, production services also enforce additional implicit permissions that aren’t required elsewhere.
Troubleshooting IAM issues in production requires validating not just the policy itself, but the broader context in which it’s evaluated.
Takeaway: IAM behavior is shaped by environment context, not just policy text.