Newly Updated: Example AWS IAM Policies for You to Use and Customize

To help you grant access to specific resources and conditions, the Example Policies page in the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) documentation now includes more than thirty policies for you to use or customize to meet your permissions requirements. The AWS Support team developed these policies from their experiences working with AWS customers over the years. The example policies cover common permissions use cases you might encounter across services such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, and IAM.

In this blog post, I introduce the updated Example Policies page and explain how to use and customize these policies for your needs.

The new Example Policies page

The Example Policies page in the IAM User Guide now provides an overview of the example policies and includes a link to view each policy on a separate page. Note that each of these policies has been reviewed and approved by AWS Support. If you would like to submit a policy that you have found to be particularly useful, post it on the IAM forum.

To give you an idea of the policies we have included on this page, the following are a few of the EC2 policies on the page:

• Attach or Detach Amazon EBS Volumes to EC2 Instances Based on Tags
• Allows Full EC2 Access Within a Specific Region, Programmatically and in the Console
• Allows Launching EC2 Instances in a Specific Subnet, Programmatically and in the Console

To see the full list of available policies, see the Example Polices page.

In the following section, I demonstrate how to use a policy from the Example Policies page and customize it for your needs.

How to customize an example policy for your needs

Suppose you want to allow an IAM user, Bob, to start and stop EC2 instances with a specific resource tag. After looking through the Example Policies page, you see the policy, Allows Starting or Stopping EC2 Instances a User Has Tagged, Programmatically and in the Console.

To apply this policy to your specific use case:

1. Navigate to the Policies section of the IAM console.
2. Choose Create policy.
   
   
3. Choose the Select button next to Create Your Own Policy. You will see an empty policy document with boxes for Policy Name, Description, and Policy Document, as shown in the following screenshot.
   
4. Type a name for the policy, copy the policy from the Example Policies page, and paste the policy in the Policy Document box. In this example, I use “start-stop-instances-for-owner-tag” as the policy name and “Allows users to start or stop instances if the instance tag Owner has the value of their user name” as the description.
5. Update the placeholder text in the policy (see the full policy that follows this step). For example, replace <REGION> with a region from AWS Regions and Endpoints and <ACCOUNTNUMBER> with your 12-digit account number. The IAM policy variable, ${aws:username}, is a dynamic property in the policy that automatically applies to the user to which it is attached. For example, when the policy is attached to Bob, the policy replaces ${aws:username} with Bob. If you do not want to use the key value pair of Owner and ${aws:username}, you can edit the policy to include your desired key value pair. For example, if you want to use the key value pair, CostCenter:1234, you can modify “ec2:ResourceTag/Owner”: “${aws:username}” to “ec2:ResourceTag/CostCenter”: “1234”.

   {
       "Version": "2012-10-17",
       "Statement": [
          {
         "Effect": "Allow",
         "Action": [
             "ec2:StartInstances",
             "ec2:StopInstances"
         ],
                "Resource": "arn:aws:ec2:<REGION>:<ACCOUNTNUMBER>:instance/*",
                "Condition": {
             "StringEquals": {
                 "ec2:ResourceTag/Owner": "${aws:username}"
             }
         }
           },
           {
                "Effect": "Allow",
                "Action": "ec2:DescribeInstances",
                "Resource": "*"
           }
       ]
   }

6. After you have edited the policy, choose Create policy.

You have created a policy that allows an IAM user to stop and start EC2 instances in your account, as long as these instances have the correct resource tag and the policy is attached to your IAM users. You also can attach this policy to an IAM group and apply the policy to users by adding them to that group.

Summary

We updated the Example Policies page in the IAM User Guide so that you have a central location where you can find examples of the most commonly requested and used IAM policies. In addition to these example policies, we recommend that you review the list of AWS managed policies, including the AWS managed policies for job functions. You can choose these predefined policies from the IAM console and associate them with your IAM users, groups, and roles.

We will add more IAM policies to the Example Policies page over time. If you have a useful policy you would like to share with others, post it on the IAM forum. If you have comments about this post, submit them in the “Comments” section below.

– Deren