AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps you securely control access to AWS resources, and Amazon ECS is no exception. IAM controls what can access ECS resources in your AWS accounts. IAM also controls which AWS resources ECS and tasks running in ECS can access. This will be the focus of this lab.

Two types of IAM roles are used by ECS:

1. ECS task execution role: This role is used by the ECS agent to pull container images and send logs to CloudWatch.
2. ECS task role: This role is used by the containers to access other AWS services they depend on at runtime.

In this lab, you will learn about the ECS IAM roles first-hand and diagnose and troubleshoot related issues.

Learning objectives

Upon completion of this intermediate-level lab, you will be able to:

• Explain ECS task execution roles and task roles
• Diagnose and debug IAM issues in ECS
• Resolve IAM issues in ECS running

Intended audiences

• DevOps Engineers
• Security Specialists
• Software Engineers

Prerequisites

Familiarity with the following topics is required to get the most out of this lab:

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) fundamentals (roles and policies)
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) on AWS Fargate fundamentals
• Terraform fundamentals, with experience deploying on AWS

The following content can be used to fulfill the prerequisites:

• Introduction to IAM
• Advanced Roles and Groups Management Using IAM
• Use AWS Fargate for Serverless Deployment of Container Applications
• Terraform - Provisioning AWS Infrastructure