How Amazon Elastic Container Service works with IAM

Before you use IAM to manage access to Amazon ECS, learn what IAM features are available to use with Amazon ECS.

To get a high-level view of how Amazon ECS and other AWS services work with most IAM features, see AWS services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Identity-based policies for Amazon ECS

Supports identity-based policies: Yes

Identity-based policies are JSON permissions policy documents that you can attach to an identity, such as an IAM user, group of users, or role. These policies control what actions users and roles can perform, on which resources, and under what conditions. To learn how to create an identity-based policy, see Define custom IAM permissions with customer managed policies in the IAM User Guide.

With IAM identity-based policies, you can specify allowed or denied actions and resources as well as the conditions under which actions are allowed or denied. To learn about all of the elements that you can use in a JSON policy, see IAM JSON policy elements reference in the IAM User Guide.

Identity-based policy examples for Amazon ECS

To view examples of Amazon ECS identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Elastic Container Service.

Resource-based policies within Amazon ECS

Supports resource-based policies: No

Resource-based policies are JSON policy documents that you attach to a resource. Examples of resource-based policies are IAM role trust policies and Amazon S3 bucket policies. In services that support resource-based policies, service administrators can use them to control access to a specific resource. For the resource where the policy is attached, the policy defines what actions a specified principal can perform on that resource and under what conditions. You must specify a principal in a resource-based policy. Principals can include accounts, users, roles, federated users, or AWS services.

To enable cross-account access, you can specify an entire account or IAM entities in another account as the principal in a resource-based policy. For more information, see Cross account resource access in IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Policy actions for Amazon ECS

Supports policy actions: Yes

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Action element of a JSON policy describes the actions that you can use to allow or deny access in a policy. Include actions in a policy to grant permissions to perform the associated operation.

To see a list of Amazon ECS actions, see Actions defined by Amazon Elastic Container Service in the Service Authorization Reference.

Policy actions in Amazon ECS use the following prefix before the action:

ecs

To specify multiple actions in a single statement, separate them with commas.

"Action": [ "ecs:action1", "ecs:action2" ]

You can specify multiple actions using wildcards (*). For example, to specify all actions that begin with the word Describe, include the following action:

"Action": "ecs:Describe*"

To view examples of Amazon ECS identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Elastic Container Service.

Policy resources for Amazon ECS

Supports policy resources: Partial

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Resource JSON policy element specifies the object or objects to which the action applies. As a best practice, specify a resource using its Amazon Resource Name (ARN). For actions that don't support resource-level permissions, use a wildcard (*) to indicate that the statement applies to all resources.

"Resource": "*"

To see a list of Amazon ECS resource types and their ARNs, see Resources defined by Amazon Elastic Container Service in the Service Authorization Reference. To learn with which actions you can specify the ARN of each resource, see Actions defined by Amazon Elastic Container Service.

Some Amazon ECS API actions support multiple resources. For example, multiple clusters can be referenced when calling the DescribeClusters API action. To specify multiple resources in a single statement, separate the ARNs with commas.

"Resource": [ "EXAMPLE-RESOURCE-1", "EXAMPLE-RESOURCE-2"

For example, the Amazon ECS cluster resource has the following ARN:

arn:${Partition}:ecs:${Region}:${Account}:cluster/${clusterName}

To specify my-cluster-1 and my-cluster-2 cluster in your statement, use the following ARNs:

"Resource": [ "arn:aws:ecs:us-east-1:123456789012:cluster/my-cluster-1", "arn:aws:ecs:us-east-1:123456789012:cluster/my-cluster-2" 

To specify all clusters that belong to a specific account, use the wildcard (*):

"Resource": "arn:aws:ecs:us-east-1:123456789012:cluster/*"

For task definitions, you can specify the latest revision, or a specific revision.

To specify all revisions of the task definition, use the wildcard (*):

"Resource:arn:${Partition}:ecs:${Region}:${Account}:task-definition/${TaskDefinitionFamilyName}:*"

To specify a specific task definition revision, use ${TaskDefinitionRevisionNumber}:

"Resource:arn:${Partition}:ecs:${Region}:${Account}:task-definition/${TaskDefinitionFamilyName}:${TaskDefinitionRevisionNumber}"

To view examples of Amazon ECS identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Elastic Container Service.

Policy condition keys for Amazon ECS

Supports service-specific policy condition keys: Yes

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Condition element specifies when statements execute based on defined criteria. You can create conditional expressions that use condition operators, such as equals or less than, to match the condition in the policy with values in the request. To see all AWS global condition keys, see AWS global condition context keys in the IAM User Guide.

Amazon ECS supports the following service-specific condition keys that you can use to provide fine-grained filtering for your IAM policies:

To see a list of Amazon ECS condition keys, see Condition keys for Amazon Elastic Container Service in the Service Authorization Reference. To learn with which actions and resources you can use a condition key, see Actions defined by Amazon Elastic Container Service.

To view examples of Amazon ECS identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Elastic Container Service.

Access control lists (ACLs) in Amazon ECS

Supports ACLs: No

Access control lists (ACLs) control which principals (account members, users, or roles) have permissions to access a resource. ACLs are similar to resource-based policies, although they do not use the JSON policy document format.

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) with Amazon ECS

Supports ABAC (tags in policies): Yes

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is an authorization strategy that defines permissions based on attributes called tags. You can attach tags to IAM entities and AWS resources, then design ABAC policies to allow operations when the principal's tag matches the tag on the resource.

To control access based on tags, you provide tag information in the condition element of a policy using the aws:ResourceTag/key-name, aws:RequestTag/key-name, or aws:TagKeys condition keys.

If a service supports all three condition keys for every resource type, then the value is Yes for the service. If a service supports all three condition keys for only some resource types, then the value is Partial.

For more information about ABAC, see Define permissions with ABAC authorization in the IAM User Guide. To view a tutorial with steps for setting up ABAC, see Use attribute-based access control (ABAC) in the IAM User Guide.

For more information about tagging Amazon ECS resources, see Tagging Amazon ECS resources.

To view an example identity-based policy for limiting access to a resource based on the tags on that resource, see Describing Amazon ECS services based on tags.

Using Temporary credentials with Amazon ECS

Supports temporary credentials: Yes

Temporary credentials provide short-term access to AWS resources and are automatically created when you use federation or switch roles. AWS recommends that you dynamically generate temporary credentials instead of using long-term access keys. For more information, see Temporary security credentials in IAM and AWS services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Forward access sessions for Amazon ECS

Supports forward access sessions (FAS): Yes

Forward access sessions (FAS) use the permissions of the principal calling an AWS service, combined with the requesting AWS service to make requests to downstream services. For policy details when making FAS requests, see Forward access sessions.

Service roles for Amazon ECS

Supports service roles: Yes

A service role is an IAM role that a service assumes to perform actions on your behalf. An IAM administrator can create, modify, and delete a service role from within IAM. For more information, see Create a role to delegate permissions to an AWS service in the IAM User Guide.

Service-linked roles for Amazon ECS

Supports service-linked roles: Yes

A service-linked role is a type of service role that is linked to an AWS service. The service can assume the role to perform an action on your behalf. Service-linked roles appear in your AWS account and are owned by the service. An IAM administrator can view, but not edit the permissions for service-linked roles.

For details about creating or managing Amazon ECS service-linked roles, see Using service-linked roles for Amazon ECS.