An IAM (Identity and Access Management) role in EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a secure way to grant permissions to entities like EC2 instances. Instead of attaching and managing individual IAM user credentials, IAM roles allow EC2 instances to assume a role and obtain temporary credentials, which are then used to access other AWS services or resources.
IAM roles for EC2 instances are useful for various tasks, such as accessing other AWS services like S3 buckets, interacting with AWS APIs, or even accessing resources within the same account or across accounts securely.
Here’s how it generally works:
- You create an IAM role in the IAM console with the necessary permissions.
- When launching an EC2 instance, you specify the IAM role for that instance.
- The EC2 instance is granted temporary security credentials that are automatically rotated by AWS.
- The EC2 instance can use these temporary credentials to make API calls to other AWS services or resources.
IAM roles help improve security by reducing the need for storing long-term credentials on instances, simplifying access management, and providing a more scalable and secure way to manage permissions in AWS environments.