AWS IAM integration

This section describes how to setup an AWS IAM role which can then be assumed by pods running in a Kubernetes cluster. You only need AWS IAM roles if your application calls the AWS API directly (e.g. to store data in some S3 bucket).

Create IAM Role with AssumeRole trust relationship

In order for an AWS IAM role to be assumed by the worker node and passed on to a pod running on the node, it must allow the worker node IAM role to assume it.

This is achived by adding a trust relation on the role trust relationship policy document. Assuming the account number is 12345678912 and the cluster name is kube-1, the policy document would look like this:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::12345678912:role/kube-1-worker"
      },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole"
    }
  ]
}

Reference IAM role in pod

In order to use the IAM role in a pod you simply need to reference the role name in an annotation on the pod specification. As an example we can create a simple deployment for an application called myapp which require the IAM role myapp-iam-role:

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: myapp
spec:
  replicas: 1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: myapp
      annotations:
        iam.amazonaws.com/role: myapp-iam-role
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: myapp
        image: myapp:v1.0

To test that the pod gets the correct role you can exec into the container and query the metadata endpoint.

$ zkubectl exec -it myapp-podid -- sh
$ curl -s 169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/iam/security-credentials/
myapp-iam-role

The response should be the name of the role available from within the pod.