Tag Amazon EBS Snapshots on Creation and Implement Stronger Security Policies

This blog was contributed by Rucha Nene, Sr. Product Manager for Amazon EBS

AWS customers use tags to track ownership of resources, implement compliance protocols, control access to resources via IAM policies, and drive their cost accounting processes. Last year, we made tagging for Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon EBS volumes easier by adding the ability to tag these resources upon creation. We are now extending this capability to EBS snapshots.

Earlier, you could tag your EBS snapshots only after the resource had been created and sometimes, ended up with EBS snapshots in an untagged state if tagging failed. You also could not control the actions that users and groups could take over specific snapshots, or enforce tighter security policies.

To address these issues, we are making tagging for EBS snapshots more flexible and giving customers more control over EBS snapshots by introducing two new capabilities:

• Tag on creation for EBS snapshots – You can now specify tags for EBS snapshots as part of the API call that creates the resource or via the Amazon EC2 Console when creating an EBS snapshot.
• Resource-level permission and enforced tag usage – The CreateSnapshot, DeleteSnapshot, and ModifySnapshotAttrribute API actions now support IAM resource-level permissions. You can now write IAM policies that mandate the use of specific tags when taking actions on EBS snapshots.

Tag on creation

You can now specify tags for EBS snapshots as part of the API call that creates the resources. The resource creation and the tagging are performed atomically; both must succeed in order for the operation CreateSnapshot to succeed. You no longer need to build tagging scripts that run after EBS snapshots have been created.

Here’s how you specify tags when you create an EBS snapshot, using the console:

1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
2. In the navigation pane, choose Snapshots, Create Snapshot.
3. On the Create Snapshot page, select the volume for which to create a snapshot.
4. (Optional) Choose Add tags to your snapshot. For each tag, provide a tag key and a tag value.
5. Choose Create Snapshot.

Using the AWS CLI:

aws ec2 create-snapshot --volume-id vol-0c0e757e277111f3c --description 'Prod_Backup' --tag-specifications 
'ResourceType=snapshot,Tags=[{Key=costcenter,Value=115},{Key=IsProd,Value=Yes}]'

To learn more, see Using Tags.

{
   "Version":"2012-10-17",
   "Statement":[
      {
         "Effect":"Allow",
         "Action":"ec2:CreateSnapshot",
         "Resource":"arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:123456789012:volume/*",
	   "Condition": {
		"StringEquals":{
               "ec2:ResourceTag/costcenter":"115"
}
 }
	
      },
      {
         "Sid":"AllowCreateTaggedSnapshots",
         "Effect":"Allow",
         "Action":"ec2:CreateSnapshot",
         "Resource":"arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1::snapshot/*",
         "Condition":{
            "StringEquals":{
               "aws:RequestTag/costcenter":"115",
		   "aws:RequestTag/User":"${aws:username}"
            },
            "ForAllValues:StringEquals":{
               "aws:TagKeys":[
                  "costcenter",
			"User"
               ]
            }
         }
      },
      {
         "Effect":"Allow",
         "Action":"ec2:CreateTags",
         "Resource":"arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1::snapshot/*",
         "Condition":{
            "StringEquals":{
               "ec2:CreateAction":"CreateSnapshot"
            }
         }
      }
   ]
}

{
   "Version":"2012-10-17",
   "Statement":[
      {
         "Effect":"Allow",
         "Action":"ec2:DeleteSnapshot",
         "Resource":"arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1::snapshot/*",
         "Condition":{
            "StringEquals":{
               "ec2:ResourceTag/User":"${aws:username}"
            }
         }
      }
   ]
}