Requirements for roles used to register locations

You must specify an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role when you register an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) location. AWS Lake Formation assumes that role when accessing the data in that location.

You can use one of the following role types to register a location:

• The Lake Formation service-linked role. This role grants the required permissions on the location. Using this role is the simplest way to register the location. For more information, see Using service-linked roles for Lake Formation.

• A user-defined role. Use a user-defined role when you need to grant more permissions than the service-linked role provides.

  You must use a user-defined role in the following circumstances:

  • When registering a location in another account.

    For more information, see Registering an Amazon S3 location in another AWS account and Registering an encrypted Amazon S3 location across AWS accounts.

  • If you used an AWS managed CMK (aws/s3) to encrypt the Amazon S3 location.

    For more information, see Registering an encrypted Amazon S3 location.

  • If you plan to access the location using Amazon EMR.

    If you already registered a location with the service-linked role and want to begin accessing the location with Amazon EMR, you must deregister the location and reregister it with a user-defined role. For more information, see Deregistering an Amazon S3 location.

The following are the requirements for a user-defined role:

• When creating the new role, on the Create role page of the IAM console, choose AWS service, and then under Choose a use case, choose Lake Formation.

  If you create the role using a different path, ensure that the role has a trust relationship with lakeformation.amazonaws.com. For more information, see Modifying a Role Trust Policy (Console).

• The role must have trust relationships with the following entities:

  • glue.amazonaws.com

  • lakeformation.amazonaws.com

  For more information, see Modifying a Role Trust Policy (Console).

• The role must have an inline policy that grants Amazon S3 read/write permissions on the location. The following is a typical policy.

  {
      "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [
          {
              "Effect": "Allow",
              "Action": [
                  "s3:PutObject",
                  "s3:GetObject",
                  "s3:DeleteObject"
              ],
              "Resource": [
                  "arn:aws:s3:::awsexamplebucket/*"
              ]
          },
          {
              "Effect": "Allow",
              "Action": [
                  "s3:ListBucket"
              ],
              "Resource": [
                  "arn:aws:s3:::awsexamplebucket"
              ]
          }
      ]
  }

• Add the following trust policy to the IAM role to allow the Lake Formation service to assume the role and vend temporary credentails to the integrated analytical engines.

  {
      "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [
          {
              "Sid": "DataCatalogViewDefinerAssumeRole1",
              "Effect": "Allow",
              "Principal": {
                 "Service": [
                      "glue.amazonaws.com",
                      "lakeformation.amazonaws.com"
                   ]
              },
              "Action": [
                  "sts:AssumeRole"                          
              ]
          }
      ]
  }    

• The data lake administrator who registers the location must have the iam:PassRole permission on the role.

  The following is an inline policy that grants this permission. Replace <account-id> with a valid AWS account number, and replace <role-name> with the name of the role.

  {
      "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [
          {
              "Sid": "PassRolePermissions",
              "Effect": "Allow",
              "Action": [
                  "iam:PassRole"
              ],
              "Resource": [
                  "arn:aws:iam::<account-id>:role/<role-name>"
              ]
          }
      ]
  }

• To permit Lake Formation to add logs in CloudWatch Logs and publish metrics, add the following inline policy.

  Note

  Writing to CloudWatch Logs incurs a charge.

  
  {
      "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [
          {
              "Sid": "Sid1",
              "Effect": "Allow",
              "Action": [
                  "logs:CreateLogStream",
                  "logs:CreateLogGroup",
                  "logs:PutLogEvents"
              ],
              "Resource": [
                   "arn:aws:logs:<region>:<account-id>:log-group:/aws-lakeformation-acceleration/*",
                   "arn:aws:logs:<region>:<account-id>:log-group:/aws-lakeformation-acceleration/*:log-stream:*"
              ]
          }
      ]
  }