In this hands-on lab, we’ll be dissecting the IAM role required by an EC2 instance to be able to communicate with the Systems Manager service. We’ll first locate the managed AWS policy required for this role and create an EC2 instance via the command line, assigning it the instance profile (container for role assigned). Finally, we’ll verify that Systems Manager (SSM) can detect the instance and communicate with it. (**Note:** This lab is focused on the AWS command line and all technical steps will be shown via the CLI.)
Learning Objectives
Successfully complete this lab by achieving the following learning objectives:
- Get the ARN of the SSM Policy for IAM Role AmazonEC2RoleforSSM
Note down the ARN of the policy from the following command:
aws iam list-policies --scope AWS --query "Policies[?PolicyName == 'AmazonEC2RoleforSSM']"Optionally, you may also use the following command, in addition to the value of
DefaultVersionIdfrom the above command, to look at the JSON document of the policy in question via the CLI:aws iam get-policy-version --policy-arn <ARN-OF-POLICY> --version-id <VERSION-ID-STRING-FROM-PREV-COMMAND>
- Create an IAM Role for EC2 and Assign the SSM Policy to It
Copy the following JSON and create a new JSON file in your current directory. Name it
EC2Trust.json:{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": { "Effect": "Allow", "Principal": {"Service": "ec2.amazonaws.com"}, "Action": "sts:AssumeRole" } }Create the role and attach the trust policy JSON file you created above to it. Make sure you execute the following command in the same directory where you created the
EC2Trust.jsonfile:aws iam create-role --role-name MyEC2SSMRole --assume-role-policy-document file://EC2Trust.jsonAssign the policy from the previous step to the newly created role:
aws iam attach-role-policy --role-name MyEC2SSMRole --policy-arn <SSM-POLICY-ARN>
- Create and Attach an Instance Profile to the IAM EC2 Service Role
Create an instance profile using the following command:
aws iam create-instance-profile --instance-profile-name MyEC2InstanceProfileCopy the instance profile name (
MyEC2InstanceProfile) and ARN in the output for later use when creating an EC2 instance.Add the role created in the second task to the instance profile created above:
aws iam add-role-to-instance-profile --instance-profile-name MyEC2InstanceProfile --role-name MyEC2SSMRole
- Gather the Necessary Data to Plug Into the EC2 Instance Creation Command
Get the subnet ID:
aws ec2 describe-subnets --query "Subnets[?Tags[?Value == 'SubnetA'] ].SubnetId | [0]"Get the security group ID:
aws ec2 describe-security-groups --filters Name=group-name,Values=SG --query "SecurityGroups[?GroupName == 'SG'].GroupId | [0]"Get the AMI 2 ID (with SSM installed):
aws ec2 describe-images --filters "Name=architecture,Values=x86_64" "Name=description,Values=*Amazon Linux 2 AMI 2.0.2019*gp2" "Name=owner-id,Values=137112412989" "Name=image-type,Values=machine" --query "sort_by(Images, &CreationDate)[::-1].ImageId | [0]"
- Create an EC2 Instance Using Subnet, Security Group, and AMI 2 ID
Plug in the subnet ID, security group ID, AMI 2 ID, and instance profile ARN in the following command:
aws ec2 run-instances --associate-public-ip-address --security-group-ids <SECURITY-GROUP-ID> --iam-instance-profile Arn=<INSTANCE-PROFILE-ARN> --instance-type t2.micro --image-id <AMI-ID> --subnet-id <SUBNET-ID> --tag-specifications "ResourceType=instance,Tags=[{Key=Name,Value=MyEC2}]"Note: We are giving our EC2 instance the name
MyEC2(basically we’re tagging it with this name) so we can get its instance ID and later confirm that SSM sees it.<br/>
If you gave your IAM instance profile the same name as given in the lab task (i.e., MyEC2InstanceProfile ) , you can fetch the instance profile ARN with the following command:<br/>aws iam get-instance-profile --instance-profile-name MyEC2InstanceProfile- Confirm via SSM CLI API (or GUI) that the Newly Created EC2 Instance Is Visible to It
Get the instance ID of the newly created instance (We named it
MyEC2, so we’ll use this name in the command to get its instance ID. If you tagged/named it differently, be sure to use that name):aws ec2 describe-instances --filters Name=tag:Name,Values=MyEC2 --query "Reservations[].Instances[].InstanceId"Run the following SSM instance information API command to see if the same instance ID from the command above is showing up in the SSM API’s output, replacing <INSTANCE-ID> with your instance’s ID:
aws ssm describe-instance-information --query "InstanceInformationList[?InstanceId == '<INSTANCE-ID>']"The command should return an object with information about the newly configured EC2 instance with Systems Manager.
Note: It can take up to five minutes for the instance to show up in the SSM GUI or API command output.
