IAM Users, Roles, and Policies

There are variety of ways to authenticate yourself with IAM Roles are one of the most commonly used. Here is a Cheatsheet to get you started

So you want to authenticate your apps to use AWS resources like S3 buckets, EC2 instances, and Glue jobs. IAM Roles helps you do that.

Creating Role and User

• Go into your AWS console, create a role, and a user

• When creating a role, select a required policy, e.g., S3FullAccess, and copy the Role ARN

• When you create a user, make a note of the User ARN, AWS_SECRET_KEY and AWS_ACCESS_KEY

Assigning Role to the User

Under the user permissions tab, click add inline policy. This lets the User we created create credentials dynamically to access S3.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "sts:AssumeRole",
            "Resource": [
                "<role-arn>"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Adding AssumeRole Permissions Role

In roles under trusted relationship, add the User ARN.

        {
            "Sid": "Statement1",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": {
                "AWS": "<user-arn>"
            },
            "Action": "sts:AssumeRole"
        }

That's it. You are all set to use AWS now

Configure AWS CLI

After installing AWS CLI, run the following command. It will prompt you to add the secret and access key we noted when creating the User.

If you forgot to note it down, don't panic, you will find it under the User you created

aws configure

Testing Assume Role

You can use the following CLI command or Python script to test the role

CLI command

aws sts assume-role --role-arn <role-arn> --role-session-name test

Python Script

ARN = "<role-arn>"
def assume_role():
    """aws sts assume-role --role-arn <role-arn> --role-session-name example-role"""

    client = boto3.client('sts')
    response = client.assume_role(RoleArn=ARN, RoleSessionName="dummy")

    session = Session(aws_access_key_id=response['Credentials']['AccessKeyId'],
                    aws_secret_access_key=response['Credentials']['SecretAccessKey'],
                    aws_session_token=response['Credentials']['SessionToken'])
    
    client = session.client('sts')
    account_id = client.get_caller_identity()["Account"]
    print(account_id)

    return client

assume_role()