sam pipeline bootstrap created an omnipotent role - amazon-web-services

Question

In the CI/CD section of the AWS SAM tutorial workshop, when I ran
sam pipeline init --bootstrap and went through the configurations, a role was created with this policy:
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Action": "*",
"Resource": "*",
"Effect": "Allow"
}
]
}
Doesn't this grant the role complete permission over my AWS account which is a big no no? Or is it fine because the permission is granted to an AWS service, and not a user?
This is the trust relationship:
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Principal": {
"Service": "cloudformation.amazonaws.com"
},
"Action": "sts:AssumeRole"
}
]
}

Answer 1

Having a role that exists with those permissionsis fine.
When you create a vanilla AWS Account (in other words I am not including those created by enterprise landing zones like Control Tower) it comes with a policy called AdministratorAccess and a role called Administrator.
The best practice is in who or what you allow to use that policy and when.
Roles are preferred over users, since roles provide security credentials. With a user you have durable credentials you need to secure.
In this case you are allowing CloudFormation to assume this role. This makes sense since CloudFormation often needs to be able to create and modify any resources including IAM roles. If you know you will not be creating or modifying IAM resources you can user a more restrictive role (least privilege), for example using the PowerUserAccess policy which looks like this:
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"NotAction": [
"iam:*",
"organizations:*",
"account:*"
],
"Resource": "*"
},
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"iam:CreateServiceLinkedRole",
"iam:DeleteServiceLinkedRole",
"iam:ListRoles",
"organizations:DescribeOrganization",
"account:ListRegions"
],
"Resource": "*"
}
]
}