New in Amazon EMR: Support for Federated Users

AWS announced yesterday that Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) added support for federated users. If you use Amazon EMR, you can now enable users to administer Amazon EMR clusters who are signed in to your corporate network using their corporate credentials—you no longer need to create IAM users for access to EMR.

Up to now, federated users who’ve signed into the console—for example, using an identity provider that supports SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) or a custom proxy service—have seen the Amazon EMR console disabled. But no more! Federated users now have the same console-based access to Amazon EMR that IAM users do.

The new support extends the ways in which you can take advantage of federated access to AWS. If you haven’t investigated federation, we encourage you to try it. If you already use SAML, have a look at the list of solution providers who make it easy to enable federation with AWS. Or check out some of the other federation scenarios that are available.

For more information the new release, see the Amazon EMR documentation.

– Mike