AWS authentication

Amazon defines two ways to control access to AWS resources such as S3: IAM roles and the combination of id, secrets, and (optionally) session tokens.

Amazon defines two ways to control access to AWS resources such as S3: IAM roles and the combination of id, secrets, and (optionally) session tokens. For long-term access to non-communal storage buckets, you should use IAM roles for access control centralization. You do not need to change your application's configuration if you want to change its access settings. You just alter the IAM role applied to your EC2 instances.

However, for one-time tasks like backing up and restoring the database or loading data to and from non-communal storage buckets, you should use an AWS access key.

Vertica uses both of these authentication methods to support different features and use cases:

An Eon Mode database's access to S3 for communal and catalog storage must always use IAM role authentication. IAM roles are the default access control method for AWS resources. Vertica uses this method if you do not configure the legacy access control session parameters.
Individual users can read data from S3 storage locations other than the ones Vertica uses for communal storage. For example, users can use COPY to load data into Vertica from an S3 bucket or query an external table stored on S3. If the IAM role assigned to the Vertica nodes does not have access to this external S3 data, the user must set an id, secret, and optionally an access token in session variables to authorize access to it. These session variables override the IAM role set on the server. See S3 parameters for a list of these session parameters.
Individual users can export data to S3 using the Vertica Library for AWS. This library cannot use IAM authorization. Users who want to export data to S3 using this library must set id, secret, and optionally access token values in session variables. See Configure the Vertica library for Amazon Web Services for details.

Important

If the database is running in Eon Mode, using id and secret authentication is more complex. In addition to having access to the external S3 data, any id that a user sets must be authorized to read from and write to the S3 storage locations that Vertica uses to store communal and catalog data. The queries that the user executes uses this id for all storage requests, not just those for accessing external S3 data. If the id does not have access to the catalog and communal storage, the user cannot execute queries.

Configuring an IAM role

To configure an IAM role to grant Vertica to access AWS resources you must:

Create an IAM role to allow EC2 instances to access the specific resources.
Grant that role permission to access your resources.
Attach this IAM role to each EC2 instance in the Vertica cluster.

To see an example of IAM roles for a Vertica cluster, look at the roles defined in one of the Cloud Formation Templates provided by Vertica. You can download these templates from any of the Vertica entries in the Amazon Marketplace. Under each entry's Usage Information section, click the View CloudFormation Template link, then click Download CloudFormation Template.

For more information about IAM roles, see IAM Roles for Amazon EC2 in the AWS documentation.