Making your computer translate Amazon IAM Policies for you

Every time I write or read an AWS policy, I end up reading these same Docs here, because I can never remember what the resource or action means. Well no more! I want my computer to just tell me and Unix say is here to save me!

If you have policy in a file called policy.json with the following:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": {
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Action": "s3:ListBucket",
    "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::example_bucket"
  }
}

Then heres a quick Python script parsing that file, and then reading it back to you:

from os import system
import json

system("clear")
print("\n\033[36;1mPolicy to Speech Translater\033[0m\n")

policy = open("policy.json").read()

print(policy)

parsed_policy = json.loads(policy)["Statement"]

effect   = parsed_policy["Effect"]
action   = parsed_policy["Action"]
resource = parsed_policy["Resource"]

system("say -v Cellos {effect} the holder of this policy to call these {action} on the these resources: {resource}".
    format(effect=effect, action=action, resource=resource))

Make sure you have the Cellos user downloaded in your Accessibility > Speech settings.

If not you can just eliminate the user option.

system("say {effect} the holder of this policy to call these {action} on the these resources: {resource}".
    format(effect=effect, action=action, resource=resource))

I want to improve this to learn more and have some fun with Text to Speech.
Possible improvements I would like to make:

• Create an SSML document after parsing the policy json
• Parse the actions and resources to read them in a more human friendly format
• Handle multiple actions and resources better
• Handle multiple policies
• Be able to pull policies from AWS with the AWS CLI
• Use AWS Polly