Elastic Beanstalk service role - AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWSElasticBeanstalkEnhancedHealthAWSElasticBeanstalkManagedUpdatesCustomerRolePolicy

Elastic Beanstalk service role

A service role is the IAM role that Elastic Beanstalk assumes when calling other services on your behalf. For example, Elastic Beanstalk uses a service role when it calls Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling APIs to gather information. The service role that Elastic Beanstalk uses is the one that you specified when you create the Elastic Beanstalk environment.

There are two managed policies that are attached to the service role. These policies provide the permissions that allow Elastic Beanstalk to access the required AWS resources to create and manage your environments. One managed policy provides permissions for enhanced health monitoring and worker tier Amazon SQS support, and another one provides additional permissions required for managed platform updates.

AWSElasticBeanstalkEnhancedHealth

This policy grants permissions for Elastic Beanstalk to monitor instance and environment health. It also includes Amazon SQS actions to allow Elastic Beanstalk to monitor queue activity for worker environments. To view the content of this managed policy, see the AWSElasticBeanstalkEnhancedHealth page in the AWS Managed Policy Reference Guide.

AWSElasticBeanstalkManagedUpdatesCustomerRolePolicy

This policy grants permissions for Elastic Beanstalk to update environments on your behalf to perform managed platform updates. To view the content of this managed policy, see the AWSElasticBeanstalkManagedUpdatesCustomerRolePolicy page in the AWS Managed Policy Reference Guide.

Service-level permission groupings

This policy is grouped into statements based on the set of permissions provided.

  • ElasticBeanstalkPermissions – This group of permissions is for calling the Elastic Beanstalk service actions (Elastic Beanstalk APIs).

  • AllowPassRoleToElasticBeanstalkAndDownstreamServices – This group of permissions allows any role to be passed to Elastic Beanstalk and to other downstream services like AWS CloudFormation.

  • ReadOnlyPermissions – This group of permissions is for collecting information about the running environment.

  • *OperationPermissions – Groups with this naming pattern are for calling the necessary operations to perform platform updates.

  • *BroadOperationPermissions – Groups with this naming pattern are for calling the necessary operations to perform platform updates. They also include broad permissions for supporting legacy environments.

  • *TagResource – Groups with this naming pattern are for calls that use the tag-on-create APIs to attach tags on resources that are being created in an Elastic Beanstalk environment.

You may create an Elastic Beanstalk environment with any of the following approaches. Each section describes how the approach handles the service role.

Elastic Beanstalk console

If you create an environment using the Elastic Beanstalk console, Elastic Beanstalk prompts you to create a service role that's named aws-elasticbeanstalk-service-role. When created via Elastic Beanstalk, this role includes a trust policy that allows Elastic Beanstalk to assume the service role. The two managed policies described earlier in this topic are also attached to the role.

Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Interface (EB CLI)

You may create an environment using the eb create command of the Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Interface (EB CLI). If you don't specify a service role through the --service-role option. Elastic Beanstalk creates the same default service role aws-elasticbeanstalk-service-role. If the default service role already exists, Elastic Beanstalk uses it for the new environment. When created via Elastic Beanstalk, this role includes a trust policy that allows Elastic Beanstalk to assume the service role. The two managed policies described earlier in this topic are also attached to the role.

Elastic Beanstalk API

You may create an environment using the CreateEnvironment action of the Elastic Beanstalk API. If you don't specify a service role, Elastic Beanstalk creates a monitoring service-linked role. This is a unique type of service role that is predefined by Elastic Beanstalk to include all the permissions that the service requires to call other AWS services on your behalf. The service-linked role is associated with your account. Elastic Beanstalk creates it once, and then reuses it when creating additional environments. You can also use IAM to create the monitoring service-linked role for your account in advance. When your account has a monitoring service-linked role, you can use it to create an environment using either the Elastic Beanstalk console, the Elastic Beanstalk API, or the EB CLI. For instructions on how to use service-linked roles with Elastic Beanstalk environments, see Using service-linked roles for Elastic Beanstalk.

For more information about service roles, see Managing Elastic Beanstalk service roles.