Best way to pass AWS credentials to a Docker container

Working with Docker containers in any environment that needs to talk to AWS Services, passing credentials securely is a key part of the setup. If you want a seamless cloud integration, one of the most important things to ensure is that your container has the right credentials to communicate with S3, DynamoDB, RDS etc. 

Often applications that require access to AWS services are hosted on Docker containers. Say for instance your app has to store files in an S3 bucket, query a RDS database, write logs to CloudWatch among other things. In order to use these services the app must authenticate itself using the AWS credentials, whether this be access keys, or IAM roles.

1. Use mount `$HOME/.aws/credentials` to the container

Advantages:

• Very simple and easy to configure, even for local environment development.
• This means that you can actually use existing credentials which are already present on your local machine.

Disadvantages:

• Not secure for production environments. Credentials are stored in your machine and potentially exposed by mounting them in a container that has risks for a compromised container.
• None of these work well in some distributed systems (ECS, EKS, etc) or in CI/CD pipelines.

Example:

2.Use IAM Role

Advantages:

• ESPECIALLY production environments, Most secure option.
• Credentials aren’t hard coded or file mounted. The container will assume the role of AWS so that it may securely access AWS resources.
• It works really well in the cloud as well-ECS, EKS, EC2 etc. where the container can take this IAM role of the services or of the instance.

Disadvantages:

• There’s a bit of initial complexity added, but it requires IAM roles and policies set up.

It’s important to pass AWS credentials securely to containers in a cloud based application. For development it’s quite simple to mount local credentials, but for production environment IAM roles are the most secure way and we have a seamless and safe AWS service integration.

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