Amazon now allows IAM roles to be attached to existing EC2 instances
posted | about 1 minute to read
tags: amazon web services ec2 iam system administration
Just wanted to dash off a quick note. Amazon Web Services announced last week that you can now add IAM roles to your existing EC2 instances. This means you won’t have to recreate an instance in order to attach a role - now, you can use my tutorial on sending backups of your EC2-hosted data to S3 on instances you’ve already created, and not just new instances. I’ve updated the tutorial to reflect this new information. The upshot here is that adding backup scripts to currently running instances is now a lot easier, so it’s well worth taking advantage of getting this set up on all of your instances in the interest of preserving integrity of your data.
If you’re looking for a more comprehensive backup and recovery solution - say, scheduled snapshots of an entire EBS volume, so that you can simply attach the snapshot to a new instance and spin it up - I’m going to visit that topic in a later post. For now, I wanted to make sure I mentioned this.