As I have been developing and testing on Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting I have made much use of the Identity and Access Management (IAM) feature. In particular, I have found the IAM Roles to be extremely helpful. I can assign a role to a specific instance or even a launch group of instances. When those instances are launched they have all the permissions of the role that I have specified for them. This means that if an instance needs to access files that are on S3, I just add that permission to the role and the instance is able to access S3 files. This is extremely useful for system admin scripts as well as other programming tasks.
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