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Using EC2 Roles and Instance Profiles in AWS

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provide the ability to grant instances temporary credentials. These temporary credentials can then be used by hosted applications to access permissions configured within the role. IAM roles eliminate the need for managing credentials, help mitigate long-term security risks, and simplify permissions management. Prerequisites for this lab include understanding how to log in to and use the AWS Management Console, EC2 basics (including how to launch an instance), IAM basics (including users, policies, and roles), and how to use the AWS CLI.

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Path Info

Level
Clock icon Intermediate
Duration
Clock icon 1h 30m
Last updated
Clock icon Sep 03, 2025

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Table of Contents

  1. Challenge

    Create a Trust Policy and Role Using the AWS CLI

    1. From the AWS Management Console, open the provisioned S3 bucket with s3bucketlookupfiles in its name and obtain the labreferences.txt file. This file serves as a reference containing the S3 bucket names used throughout the lab.
    2. Open a new terminal session.
    3. Log in to the EC2 Bastion Host instance using the provided lab credentials and set the AWS CLI region and output type.
    4. Create an IAM trust policy for an EC2 role.
    5. Create an IAM role named DEV_ROLE.
    6. Create an IAM policy named DevS3ReadAccess and define Get and List access permissions for the provisioned S3 bucket with s3bucketdev in its name .

  2. Challenge

    Create Instance Profile and Attach Role to an EC2 Instance

    1. Attach the DevS3ReadAccess policy to the DEV_ROLE role.
    2. Create the instance profile DEV_PROFILE and add the DEV_ROLE to it via the AWS CLI.
    3. Attach the DEV_PROFILE role to the EC2 Web Server instance.

  3. Challenge

    Test S3 Permissions via the AWS CLI

    1. Log in to the EC2 Web Server instance using the provided lab credentials.
    2. Verify that the Web Server instance is assuming the DEV_ROLE role.
    3. List the buckets in the account.
    4. Attempt to view the files in the s3bucketdev bucket.

  4. Challenge

    Create an IAM Policy and Role Using the AWS Management Console

    1. From the AWS Management Console, navigate to IAM > Policies.
    2. Create an IAM policy named ProdS3ReadAccess and define Get and List access permissions for the provisioned S3 bucket with s3bucketprod in its name .
    3. Create a PROD_ROLE role and attach it to the ProdS3ReadAccess policy.

  5. Challenge

    Attach IAM Role to an EC2 Instance Using the AWS Management Console

    1. Navigate to EC2 > Instances.
    2. Attach the PROD_ROLE role to the Web Server instance.
    3. Open a terminal session and log in to the EC2 Web Server instance using the provided lab credentials.
    4. Verify that the Web Server instance is assuming the PROD_ROLE.
    5. List the buckets.
    6. Attempt to view the files in the s3bucketprod bucket.
    7. Attempt to view the files in the s3bucketsecret bucket.
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