permissions. In its most basic sense, a policy lets you specify the following: • Actions: what actions you will allow. Each AWS service has its own set of actions. For example, you might allow a user to use the Amazon S3 ListBucket action, which returns information about the items in a bucket. Any actions that you don't explicitly allow are denied. • Resources: which resources you allow the action on. For example, what specific Amazon S3 buckets will you allow the user to perform the ListBucket action on? Users cannot access any resources that you have not explicitly granted permissions to. • Effect: what the effect will be when the user requests access—either allow or deny. Because the default is that resources are denied to users, you typically specify that you will allow users access to resource.