Giving S3 access to EC2 Servers

Question

I have developed a photo sharing application and would like to deploy it on EC2. The application would be putting and getting the images from S3 as it is very scalable and reliable. But, the application on EC2 is not able to interact with S3 to store and get the images. How do I provide the permissions to EC2 to interact with S3 or any other services?

Answer 1

This can be done using IAM roles. IAM roles are attached to the AWS resources like EC2, Lambda, RedShift to give the proper permissions. Here are the sequence of steps for the same.

• Create a policy to give Read and Write Permissions to a specific S3 Bucket or use the existing AmazonS3FullAccess policy.
• Create an IAM role and attach the one of the above policies.
• Attach the role to the EC2 instance.

Depending upon the policy attached to the role, the EC2 would be getting the appropriate permissions. In this case, the application running on EC2 would be able to upload/ download the images from S3.