Getting Started with IAM Roles for EC2 Instances

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps you securely control access to Amazon Web Services and your account resources. IAM can also keep your account credentials private. With IAM, you can create multiple IAM users under the umbrella of your AWS account or enable temporary access through identity federation with your corporate directory. In some cases, you can also enable access to resources across AWS accounts.

Without IAM, however, you must either create multiple AWS accounts—each with its own billing and subscriptions to AWS products—or your employees must share the security credentials of a single AWS account. In addition, without IAM, you cannot control the tasks a particular user or system can do and what AWS resources they might use.

 

 

AWS has recently launched IAM Roles for EC2 Instances. A role is an entity that has a set of permissions that can be assumed by another entity. Use roles to enable applications running on your Amazon EC2 instances to securely access your AWS resources.You grant a specific set of permissions to a role, use the role to launch an EC2 instance, and let EC2 automatically handle AWS credential management for your applications that run on Amazon EC2. Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to create a role and to grant permissions to the role.

 

 

IAM roles for Amazon EC2 provide:

  

• AWS access keys for applications running on Amazon EC2 instances
• Automatic rotation of the AWS access keys on the Amazon EC2 instance
• Granular permissions for applications running on Amazon EC2 instances that make requests to your AWS services

  

The below video demonstrates basic workflow of:

 

 

 

For more help, refer the AWS documentation for IAM here.

 

For other AWS Documentations, please refer to the quick links provided in the Blogger's right-side panel.