Amazon managed policies for Amazon EC2 - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
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Amazon managed policies for Amazon EC2

To add permissions to users, groups, and roles, it is easier to use Amazon managed policies than to write policies yourself. It takes time and expertise to create IAM customer managed policies that provide your team with only the permissions they need. To get started quickly, you can use our Amazon managed policies. These policies cover common use cases and are available in your Amazon account. For more information about Amazon managed policies, see Amazon managed policies in the IAM User Guide.

Amazon services maintain and update Amazon managed policies. You can't change the permissions in Amazon managed policies. Services occasionally add additional permissions to an Amazon managed policy to support new features. This type of update affects all identities (users, groups, and roles) where the policy is attached. Services are most likely to update an Amazon managed policy when a new feature is launched or when new operations become available. Services do not remove permissions from an Amazon managed policy, so policy updates won't break your existing permissions.

Additionally, Amazon supports managed policies for job functions that span multiple services. For example, the ReadOnlyAccess Amazon managed policy provides read-only access to all Amazon services and resources. When a service launches a new feature, Amazon adds read-only permissions for new operations and resources. For a list and descriptions of job function policies, see Amazon managed policies for job functions in the IAM User Guide.

Amazon managed policy: AmazonEC2FullAccess

You can attach the AmazonEC2FullAccess policy to your IAM identities. This policy grants permissions that allow full access to Amazon EC2.

To view the permissions for this policy, see AmazonEC2FullAccess in the Amazon Managed Policy Reference.

Amazon managed policy: AmazonEC2ReadOnlyAccess

You can attach the AmazonEC2ReadOnlyAccess policy to your IAM identities. This policy grants permissions that allow read-only access to Amazon EC2.

To view the permissions for this policy, see AmazonEC2ReadOnlyAccess in the Amazon Managed Policy Reference.

Amazon managed policy: AWSEC2CapacityReservationFleetRolePolicy

This policy is attached to the service-linked role named AWSServiceRoleForEC2CapacityReservationFleet to allow Capacity Reservations to create, modify, and cancel Capacity Reservations on your behalf. For more information, see Service-linked role for Capacity Reservation Fleet.

To view the permissions for this policy, see AWSEC2CapacityReservationFleetRolePolicy in the Amazon Managed Policy Reference.

Amazon managed policy: AWSEC2FleetServiceRolePolicy

This policy is attached to the service-linked role named AWSServiceRoleForEC2Fleet to allow EC2 Fleet to request, launch, terminate, and tag instances on your behalf. For more information, see Service-linked role for EC2 Fleet.

To view the permissions for this policy, see AWSEC2FleetServiceRolePolicy in the Amazon Managed Policy Reference.

Amazon managed policy: AWSEC2SpotFleetServiceRolePolicy

This policy is attached to the service-linked role named AWSServiceRoleForEC2SpotFleet to allow Spot Fleet to launch and manage instances on your behalf. For more information, see Service-linked role for Spot Fleet.

To view the permissions for this policy, see AWSEC2SpotFleetServiceRolePolicy in the Amazon Managed Policy Reference.

Amazon managed policy: AWSEC2SpotServiceRolePolicy

This policy is attached to the service-linked role named AWSServiceRoleForEC2Spot to allow Amazon EC2 to launch and manage Spot Instances on your behalf. For more information, see Service-linked role for Spot Instance requests.

To view the permissions for this policy, see AWSEC2SpotServiceRolePolicy in the Amazon Managed Policy Reference.

Amazon managed policy: AWSEC2VssSnapshotPolicy

You can attach this managed policy to the IAM instance profile role that you use for your Amazon EC2 Windows instances. The policy grants permissions to allow Amazon EC2 to create and manage VSS snapshots on your behalf.

To view the permissions for this policy, see AWSEC2VssSnapshotPolicy in the Amazon Managed Policy Reference.

Amazon managed policy: EC2FastLaunchFullAccess

You can attach the EC2FastLaunchFullAccess policy to your instance profile or other IAM role. This policy grants full access to EC2 Fast Launch actions, and targeted permissions as follows.

Permissions details
  • EC2 Fast Launch – Administrative access is granted, so that the role can enable or disable EC2 Fast Launch, and describe EC2 Fast Launch images.

  • Amazon EC2 – Access is granted for Amazon EC2 RunInstances, CreateTags and Describe actions that are needed to verify resource permissions.

  • IAM – Access is granted to get and use instance profiles whose name contains ec2fastlaunch to create the EC2FastLaunchServiceRolePolicy service-linked role.

To view the permissions for this policy, see EC2FastLaunchFullAccess in the Amazon Managed Policy Reference.

Amazon managed policy: EC2FastLaunchServiceRolePolicy

This policy is attached to the service-linked role named AWSServiceRoleForEC2FastLaunch to allow Amazon EC2 to create and manage a set of pre-provisioned snapshots that reduce the time it takes to launch instances from your EC2 Fast Launch-enabled AMI. For more information, see Service-linked role for EC2 Fast Launch.

To view the permissions for this policy, see EC2FastLaunchServiceRolePolicy in the Amazon Managed Policy Reference.

Amazon managed policy: Ec2InstanceConnectEndpoint

This policy is attached to a service-linked role named AWSServiceRoleForEC2InstanceConnect to allow EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint to perform actions on your behalf. For more information, see Service-linked role for EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint.

To view the permissions for this policy, see Ec2InstanceConnectEndpoint in the Amazon Managed Policy Reference.

Amazon EC2 updates to Amazon managed policies

View details about updates to Amazon managed policies for Amazon EC2 since this service began tracking these changes.

Change Description Date

EC2FastLaunchFullAccess – New policy

Amazon EC2 added this policy to perform API actions related to the EC2 Fast Launch feature from an instance. The policy can be attached to the instance profile for an instance that's launched from a EC2 Fast Launch enabled AMI. May 14, 2024

AWSEC2VssSnapshotPolicy – New policy

Amazon EC2 added the AWSEC2VssSnapshotPolicy policy that contains permissions to create and add tags to Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and EBS snapshots. March 28, 2024

EC2FastLaunchServiceRolePolicy – New policy

Amazon EC2 added the EC2 Fast Launch feature to enable Windows AMIs to launch instances faster by creating a set of pre-provisioned snapshots. November 26, 2021
Amazon EC2 started tracking changes Amazon EC2 started tracking changes to its Amazon managed policies March 1, 2021