A break-glass human administrator needs console access in an emerge…

Question

A break-glass human administrator needs console access in an emergency, while an EC2 fleet needs permissions to read objects from a specific S3 bucket. How should those identities typically be modeled?

Accepted Answer

Use an IAM user for the break-glass human and an IAM role for the EC2 instances — People who occasionally need a console login map cleanly to IAM users (especially break-glass). Servers should not get long-lived user keys stuffed on disk — attach an instance role so EC2 picks up temporary credentials automatically.

Answer

Use the root user for both the human and every EC2 instance

Answer

Store S3 permissions only in security group inbound rules

Answer

Create access keys for the root user and install them on each instance

A break-glass human administrator needs console access in an emergency, while an EC2 fleet needs permissions to read objects from a specific S3 bucket. How should those identities typically be modeled?

Short Explanation

Full Explanation