Overview of managing access permissions to your Amazon Redshift resources

Every AWS resource is owned by an AWS account, and permissions to create or access the resources are governed by permissions policies. An account administrator can attach permissions policies to IAM identities (that is, users, groups, and roles), and some services (such as AWS Lambda) also support attaching permissions policies to resources.

Note

An account administrator (or administrator user) is a user with administrator privileges. For more information, see IAM best practices in the IAM User Guide.

When granting permissions, you decide who is getting the permissions, which resources they get permissions for, and the specific actions that you want to allow on those resources.

Amazon Redshift resources and operations

Amazon Redshift provides service-specific resources, actions, and condition context keys for use in IAM permission policies.

Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Serverless, Amazon Redshift Data API, and Amazon Redshift query editor v2 access permissions

When you set up Access control, you write permission policies that you can attach to an IAM identity (identity-based policies). For detailed reference information, see the following topics in the Service Authorization Reference:

• For Amazon Redshift, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon Redshift that use the redshift: prefix.

• For Amazon Redshift Serverless, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon Redshift Serverless that use the redshift-serverless: prefix.

• For Amazon Redshift Data API, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon Redshift Data API that use the redshift-data: prefix.

• For Amazon Redshift query editor v2, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for AWS SQL Workbench (Amazon Redshift query editor v2) that use the sqlworkbench: prefix.

  The query editor v2 includes permission-only actions that don't directly correspond to an API operation. These actions are indicated in the Service Authorization Reference with [permission only].

The Service Authorization Reference contains information about which API operations can be used in an IAM policy. It also includes the AWS resource for which you can grant the permissions, and condition keys that you can include for fine-grained access control. For more information about conditions, see Using IAM policy conditions for fine-grained access control.

You specify the actions in the policy's Action field, the resource value in the policy's Resource field, and conditions in the policy's Condition field. To specify an action for Amazon Redshift, use the redshift: prefix followed by the API operation name (for example, redshift:CreateCluster).

Understanding resource ownership

A resource owner is the AWS account that created a resource. That is, the resource owner is the AWS account of the principal entity (the root account, an IAM user, or an IAM role) that authenticates the request that creates the resource. The following examples illustrate how this works:

• If you use the root account credentials of your AWS account to create a DB cluster, your AWS account is the owner of the Amazon Redshift resource.

• If you create an IAM role in your AWS account with permissions to create Amazon Redshift resources, anyone who can assume the role can create Amazon Redshift resources. Your AWS account, to which the role belongs, owns the Amazon Redshift resources.

• If you create an IAM user in your AWS account and grant permissions to create Amazon Redshift resources to that user, the user can create Amazon Redshift resources. However, your AWS account, to which the user belongs, owns the Amazon Redshift resources. In most cases this method isn't recommended. We recommend creating an IAM role and attaching permissions to the role, then assigning the role to a user.

Managing access to resources

A permissions policy describes who has access to what. The following section explains the available options for creating permissions policies.

Note

This section discusses using IAM in the context of Amazon Redshift. It doesn't provide detailed information about the IAM service. For complete IAM documentation, see What is IAM? in the IAM User Guide. For information about IAM policy syntax and descriptions, see AWS IAM policy reference in the IAM User Guide.

Policies attached to an IAM identity are referred to as identity-based policies (IAM policies) and policies attached to a resource are referred to as resource-based policies. Amazon Redshift supports only identity-based policies (IAM policies).

Identity-based policies (IAM policies)

You can assign permissions by attaching polices to an IAM role and then assigning that role to a user or group. The following is an example policy that containing permissions to create, delete, modify, and reboot Amazon Redshift clusters for your AWS account.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid":"AllowManageClusters",
      "Effect":"Allow",
      "Action": [
        "redshift:CreateCluster",
        "redshift:DeleteCluster",
        "redshift:ModifyCluster",
        "redshift:RebootCluster"
      ],
      "Resource":"*"
    }
  ]
}

For more information about using identity-based policies with Amazon Redshift, see Using identity-based policies (IAM policies) for Amazon Redshift. For more information about users, groups, roles, and permissions, see Identities (users, groups, and roles) in the IAM User Guide.

Resource-based policies

Other services, such as Amazon S3, also support resource-based permissions policies. For example, you can attach a policy to an S3 bucket to manage access permissions to that bucket. Amazon Redshift doesn't support resource-based policies.

Specifying policy elements: Actions, effects, resources, and principals

For each Amazon Redshift resource (see Amazon Redshift resources and operations), the service defines a set of API operations (see Actions). To grant permissions for these API operations, Amazon Redshift defines a set of actions that you can specify in a policy. Performing an API operation can require permissions for more than one action.

The following are the basic policy elements:

• Resource – In a policy, you use an Amazon Resource Name (ARN) to identify the resource to which the policy applies. For more information, see Amazon Redshift resources and operations.

• Action – You use action keywords to identify resource operations that you want to allow or deny. For example, the redshift:DescribeClusters permission allows the user permissions to perform the Amazon Redshift DescribeClusters operation.

• Effect – You specify the effect when the user requests the specific action—this can be either allow or deny. If you don't explicitly grant access to (allow) a resource, access is implicitly denied. You can also explicitly deny access to a resource, which you might do to make sure that a user cannot access it, even if a different policy grants access.

• Principal – In identity-based policies (IAM policies), the user that the policy is attached to is the implicit principal. For resource-based policies, you specify the user, account, service, or other entity that you want to receive permissions (applies to resource-based policies only). Amazon Redshift doesn't support resource-based policies.

To learn more about IAM policy syntax and descriptions, see AWS IAM policy reference in the IAM User Guide.

For a table showing all of the Amazon Redshift API actions and the resources that they apply to, see Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Serverless, Amazon Redshift Data API, and Amazon Redshift query editor v2 access permissions.

Specifying conditions in a policy

When you grant permissions, you can use the access policy language to specify the conditions when a policy should take effect. For example, you might want a policy to be applied only after a specific date. For more information about specifying conditions in an access policy language, see IAM JSON policy elements: Condition in the IAM User Guide.

To identify conditions where a permissions policy applies, include a Condition element in your IAM permissions policy. For example, you can create a policy that permits a user to create a cluster using the redshift:CreateCluster action, and you can add a Condition element to restrict that user to only create the cluster in a specific region. For details, see Using IAM policy conditions for fine-grained access control. For a list showing all of condition key values and the Amazon Redshift actions and resources that they apply to, see Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Serverless, Amazon Redshift Data API, and Amazon Redshift query editor v2 access permissions.

Using IAM policy conditions for fine-grained access control

In Amazon Redshift, you can use condition keys to restrict access to resources based on the tags for those resources. The following are common Amazon Redshift condition keys.

Condition key	Description
aws:RequestTag	Requires users to include a tag key (name) and value whenever they create a resource. For more information, see aws:RequestTag in the IAM User Guide.
aws:ResourceTag	Restricts user access to resources based on specific tag keys and values. For more information, see aws:ResourceTag in the IAM User Guide.
aws:TagKeys	Use this key to compare the tag keys in a request with the keys that you specify in the policy. For more information, see aws:TagKeys in the IAM User Guide.

For information on tags, see Tag resources in Amazon Redshift.

For a list of the API actions that support the redshift:RequestTag and redshift:ResourceTag condition keys, see Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Serverless, Amazon Redshift Data API, and Amazon Redshift query editor v2 access permissions.

The following condition keys can be used with the Amazon Redshift GetClusterCredentials action.

Condition key	Description
redshift:DurationSeconds	Limits the number of seconds that can be specified for duration.
redshift:DbName	Restricts database names that can be specified.
redshift:DbUser	Restricts database user names that can be specified.

Example 1: Restricting access by using the aws:ResourceTag condition key

Use the following IAM policy to let a user modify an Amazon Redshift cluster only for a specific AWS account in the us-west-2 region with a tag named environment with a tag value of test.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": {
        "Sid":"AllowModifyTestCluster",
        "Effect": "Allow",
        "Action": "redshift:ModifyCluster",
        "Resource": "arn:aws:redshift:us-west-2:123456789012:cluster:*",
        "Condition": {
            "StringEquals": {
                "aws:ResourceTag/environment": "test"
            }
        }
    }
}

Example 2: Restricting access by using the aws:RequestTag condition key

Use the following IAM policy to let a user create an Amazon Redshift cluster only if the command to create the cluster includes a tag named usage and a tag value of production. The condition with aws:TagKeys and the ForAllValues modifier specifies that only the keys costcenter and usage can be specified in the request.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": {
        "Sid":"AllowCreateProductionCluster",
        "Effect": "Allow",
        "Action": [
            "redshift:CreateCluster",
            "redshift:CreateTags"
        ],
        "Resource": "*",
        "Condition": {
            "StringEquals": {
                "aws:RequestTag/usage": "production"
            },
            "ForAllValues:StringEquals": {
                "aws:TagKeys": [
                    "costcenter",
                    "usage"
                ]
            }
        }
    }
}