Access Management roles for EC2 instances

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

If only we could make use of it..

"""
Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

We are excited to introduce AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
roles for EC2 instances, a new feature that makes it even easier for
your applications to securely access AWS service APIs from EC2
instances. IAM roles manage the muck of securely distributing AWS
credentials out to your EC2 instances so that you can focus on what
matters most – your application. Now you can create an IAM role,
assign it a set of permissions, and then launch EC2 instances with
that role. AWS access keys with the specified permissions are
automatically made available on those EC2 instances.

Suppose you have an application running on EC2 that needs to write log
files to a particular Amazon S3 bucket. You can simply create an IAM
role that grants permission to perform only PUT operations to the S3
bucket, and then launch your EC2 instances with that role. AWS access
keys with the permissions to write to your S3 bucket will
automatically be available on your EC2 instances, enabling your
application to write your log files to S3. If you have a large fleet
of machines or need to elastically scale your fleet of machines, then
you can use Auto Scaling or AWS CloudFormation to launch EC2 instances
with your IAM role. You no longer need to manage secure distribution
of AWS credentials to your applications on EC2, because IAM does that
on your behalf.

Getting started with IAM roles for EC2 instances is a short video that
illustrates how easy it is to get started. To learn more about IAM
Roles for EC2 instances, please visit Working with Roles in the Using
IAM guide and Using IAM roles with Amazon EC2 Instances in the Amazon
EC2 User Guide.
"""


gustavo @ http://niemeyer.net