What policy templates should an AWS IAM user have

Question

What policy templates should an AWS IAM user have in order to deploy and maintain an EB application (e.g. website code from a client machine)? IAMReadOnlyAccess plus PowerUserAccess seem sufficient, but I'm wondering whether the latter is overkill. Can I restrict policies to a single EB instance or application?

Answer 1

When you create an IAM role in the Web Console, there is a pre-defined role called ElasticBeanstalkFullAccess. This will give you full permission to all underlying resources that elastic beanstalk needs. You can see the general doc on this.

Restricting to specific environments or applications is much harder, but doable. It requires you to restrict the user to specific resources using arn's, including all underlying resources and their arn's. See the doc on this.

For reference, the full elastic beanstalk policy looks like this:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "elasticbeanstalk:*",
        "ec2:*",
        "elasticloadbalancing:*",
        "autoscaling:*",
        "cloudwatch:*",
        "s3:*",
        "sns:*",
        "cloudformation:*",
        "rds:*",
        "sqs:*",
        "iam:PassRole"
      ],
      "Resource": "*"
    }
  ]
}