Providing access to an Amazon service

Many Amazon services require that you use roles to control what that service can access. A role that a service assumes to perform actions on your behalf is called a service role. When a role serves a specialized purpose for a service, it can be categorized as a service role for EC2 instances, or a service-linked role. See the Amazon documentation for each service to see if it uses roles and to learn how to assign a role for the service to use.

For details about creating a role to delegate access to a service offered by Amazon, see Creating a role to delegate permissions to an Amazon service.