Amazon DocumentDB announces IAM database authentication

Posted on: Jun 25, 2024

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports cluster authentication with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users and roles ARNs. Users and applications connecting to an Amazon DocumentDB cluster to read, write, update, or delete data can now use an AWS IAM identity to authenticate connection requests. These users and applications can use the same AWS IAM user or role when connecting to different DocumentDB clusters and to other AWS services.

Applications running on AWS EC2, AWS Lambda, AWS ECS, or AWS EKS do not need to manage passwords in application when authenticating to Amazon DocumentDB using an AWS IAM role. These applications get their connection credentials through environment variables of an AWS IAM role, thus making it a passwordless mechanism.

New and existing DocumentDB clusters can use AWS IAM to authenticate cluster connections without modifying the cluster configuration. You can also choose both password-based authentication and authentication with AWS IAM ARN to authenticate different users and applications to a DocumentDB cluster. Amazon DocumentDB cluster authentication with AWS IAM ARNs is supported by drivers which are compatible with MongoDB 5.0+.

Authentication with AWS IAM ARNs is available in Amazon DocumentDB instance-based 5.0 clusters across all supported regions. To learn more, please refer to the Amazon DocumentDB documentation, and see the Region Support for complete regional availability. To learn more about IAM, refer to the product detail page.