How Amazon EMR works with IAM

Before you use IAM to manage access to Amazon EMR, learn what IAM features are available to use with Amazon EMR.

To get a high-level view of how Amazon EMR and other AWS services work with most IAM features, see AWS services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Identity-based policies for Amazon EMR

Supports identity-based policies: Yes

Identity-based policies are JSON permissions policy documents that you can attach to an identity, such as an IAM user, group of users, or role. These policies control what actions users and roles can perform, on which resources, and under what conditions. To learn how to create an identity-based policy, see Define custom IAM permissions with customer managed policies in the IAM User Guide.

With IAM identity-based policies, you can specify allowed or denied actions and resources as well as the conditions under which actions are allowed or denied. To learn about all of the elements that you can use in a JSON policy, see IAM JSON policy elements reference in the IAM User Guide.

Identity-based policy examples for Amazon EMR

To view examples of Amazon EMR identity-based policies, see Amazon EMR identity-based policy examples.

Resource-based policies within Amazon EMR

Supports resource-based policies: Yes

Resource-based policies are JSON policy documents that you attach to a resource. Examples of resource-based policies are IAM role trust policies and Amazon S3 bucket policies. In services that support resource-based policies, service administrators can use them to control access to a specific resource. For the resource where the policy is attached, the policy defines what actions a specified principal can perform on that resource and under what conditions. You must specify a principal in a resource-based policy. Principals can include accounts, users, roles, federated users, or AWS services.

To enable cross-account access, you can specify an entire account or IAM entities in another account as the principal in a resource-based policy. For more information, see Cross account resource access in IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Policy actions for Amazon EMR

Supports policy actions: Yes

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Action element of a JSON policy describes the actions that you can use to allow or deny access in a policy. Include actions in a policy to grant permissions to perform the associated operation.

To see a list of Amazon EMR actions, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon EMR in the Service Authorization Reference.

Policy actions in Amazon EMR use the following prefix before the action:

EMR

To specify multiple actions in a single statement, separate them with commas.

"Action": [
      "EMR:action1",
      "EMR:action2"
         ]

To view examples of Amazon EMR identity-based policies, see Amazon EMR identity-based policy examples.

Policy resources for Amazon EMR

Supports policy resources: Yes

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Resource JSON policy element specifies the object or objects to which the action applies. As a best practice, specify a resource using its Amazon Resource Name (ARN). For actions that don't support resource-level permissions, use a wildcard (*) to indicate that the statement applies to all resources.

"Resource": "*"

To see a list of Amazon EMR resource types and their ARNs, see Resources Defined by Amazon EMR in the Service Authorization Reference. To learn which actions you can specify the ARN of each resource, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon EMR.

To view examples of Amazon EMR identity-based policies, see Amazon EMR identity-based policy examples.

Policy condition keys for Amazon EMR

Supports service-specific policy condition keys: Yes

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Condition element specifies when statements execute based on defined criteria. You can create conditional expressions that use condition operators, such as equals or less than, to match the condition in the policy with values in the request. To see all AWS global condition keys, see AWS global condition context keys in the IAM User Guide.

To see a list of Amazon EMR condition keys and to learn which actions and resources you can use a condition key, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon EMR in the Service Authorization Reference.

To view examples of Amazon EMR identity-based policies, see Amazon EMR identity-based policy examples.

Access control lists (ACLs) in Amazon EMR

Supports ACLs: No

Access control lists (ACLs) control which principals (account members, users, or roles) have permissions to access a resource. ACLs are similar to resource-based policies, although they do not use the JSON policy document format.

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) with Amazon EMR

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is an authorization strategy that defines permissions based on attributes called tags. You can attach tags to IAM entities and AWS resources, then design ABAC policies to allow operations when the principal's tag matches the tag on the resource.

To control access based on tags, you provide tag information in the condition element of a policy using the aws:ResourceTag/key-name, aws:RequestTag/key-name, or aws:TagKeys condition keys.

If a service supports all three condition keys for every resource type, then the value is Yes for the service. If a service supports all three condition keys for only some resource types, then the value is Partial.

For more information about ABAC, see Define permissions with ABAC authorization in the IAM User Guide. To view a tutorial with steps for setting up ABAC, see Use attribute-based access control (ABAC) in the IAM User Guide.

Using Temporary credentials with Amazon EMR

Supports temporary credentials: Yes

Temporary credentials provide short-term access to AWS resources and are automatically created when you use federation or switch roles. AWS recommends that you dynamically generate temporary credentials instead of using long-term access keys. For more information, see Temporary security credentials in IAM and AWS services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Cross-service principal permissions for Amazon EMR

Supports forward access sessions (FAS): Yes

Forward access sessions (FAS) use the permissions of the principal calling an AWS service, combined with the requesting AWS service to make requests to downstream services. For policy details when making FAS requests, see Forward access sessions.

Service roles for Amazon EMR

Service-linked roles for Amazon EMR

For details about creating or managing service-linked roles, see AWS services that work with IAM. Find a service in the table that includes a Yes in the Service-linked role column. Choose the Yes link to view the service-linked role documentation for that service.

Use cluster and Notebook tags with IAM policies for access control

Permission for Amazon EMR actions associated with EMR Notebooks and EMR clusters can be fine-tuned using tag-based access control with identity-based IAM policies. You can use condition keys within a Condition element (also called a Condition block) to allow certain actions only when a notebook, cluster, or both has a certain tag key or key-value combination. You can also limit the CreateEditor action (which creates an EMR notebook) and the RunJobFlow action (which creates a cluster) so that a request for a tag must be submitted when the resource is created.

In Amazon EMR, the condition keys that can be used in a Condition element apply only to those Amazon EMR API actions where ClusterID or NotebookID is a required request parameter. For example, the ModifyInstanceGroups action does not support context keys because ClusterID is an optional parameter.

When you create an EMR notebook, a default tag is applied with a key string of creatorUserId set to the value of the IAM user ID who created the notebook. This is useful for limiting allowed actions for the notebook only to the creator.

The following condition keys are available in Amazon EMR:

Examples

To see a list of Amazon EMR actions, see Actions Defined by Amazon EMR in the IAM User Guide.