Question

An application running on an Amazon ECS container instance using the EC2 launch type needs permissions to write data to Amazon DynamoDB.

How can you assign these permissions only to the specific ECS task that is running the application?

Answer 1

To give specific Amazon ECS tasks permissions to write to DynamoDB, create an IAM policy with the required DynamoDB permissions, create an IAM role and attach the policy, set the IAM role as the task role in your ECS task definition, and launch tasks with this definition to inherit the permissions.

Step-by-step explanation:

To assign permissions only to a specific ECS task running an application that needs to write data to Amazon DynamoDB, you can use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and task definition policies. First, create an IAM role with the necessary permissions to access DynamoDB and then assign this role to the ECS task definition. This way, only the tasks that are launched from that specific task definition will have the permissions to write data to DynamoDB. This method of using IAM roles is known as the Task Role feature in ECS. It ensures that only the intended ECS task has the necessary permissions, following the principle of least privilege.

Here are the steps to set up the permissions:

• Create an IAM policy that grants the necessary DynamoDB permissions.
• Create an IAM role and attach the DynamoDB permissions policy to it.
• Specify the IAM role as the task role within your ECS task definition.
• Launch your ECS tasks using this task definition, and they will inherit the permissions from the IAM role.