Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Service-linked roles in elastic clusters

Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters use Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) service-linked roles. A service-linked role is a unique type of IAM role that is linked directly to Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters. Service-linked roles are predefined by Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters and include all the permissions that the service requires to call other Amazon services on your behalf.

A service-linked role makes using Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters easier because you don't have to manually add the necessary permissions. Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters defines the permissions of its service-linked roles, and unless defined otherwise, only Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters can assume its roles. The defined permissions include the trust policy and the permissions policy, and that permissions policy cannot be attached to any other IAM entity. You can delete the roles only after first deleting their related resources. This protects your Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters resources because you can't inadvertently remove permission to access the resources.

For information about other services that support service-linked roles, see Amazon services that work with IAM and look for the services that are marked with Yes in the Service-Linked Role column. Choose a Yes with a link to view the service-linked role documentation for that service.

Service-linked role permissions for elastic clusters

Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters uses the service-linked role named AmazonServiceRoleForDocDB-Elastic to allow Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters to call Amazon services on behalf of your clusters.

This service-linked role has a permissions policy attached to it called AmazonDocDB-ElasticServiceRolePolicy that grants it permissions to operate in your account. The role permissions policy allows Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters to complete the following actions on the specified resources:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "cloudwatch:PutMetricData"
            ],
            "Resource": "*",
            "Condition": {
                "StringEquals": {
                    "cloudwatch:namespace": [
                        "AWS/DocDB-Elastic"
                    ]
                }
            }
        }
    ]
}
  

{
"Action": "iam:CreateServiceLinkedRole",
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Resource": "arn:aws:iam::*:role/aws-service-role/docdb-elastic.amazonaws.com/AWSServiceRoleForDocDB-Elastic",
    "Condition": {
"StringLike": {
"iam:AWSServiceName":"docdb-elastic.amazonaws.com"
        }
    }
}
   

For more information, see Service-linked role permissions in the Amazon Identity and Access Management User Guide.

Creating a service-linked role for Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters

You don't need to manually create a service-linked role. When you create a DB instance, Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters creates the service-linked role for you.

Editing a service-linked role for Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters

Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters do not allow you to edit the AmazonServiceRoleForDocDB-Elastic service-linked role. After you create a service-linked role, you cannot change the name of the role because various entities might reference the role. However, you can edit the description of the role using IAM. For more information, see Editing a service-linked role in the Amazon Identity and Access Management User Guide.

Deleting a service-linked role for Amazon DocumentDB elastic clusters

If you no longer need to use a feature or service that requires a service-linked role, we recommend that you delete that role. That way you don't have an unused entity that is not actively monitored or maintained. However, you must delete all of your clusters before you can delete the service-linked role.

Cleaning up a service-linked role

Before you can use IAM to delete a service-linked role, you must first confirm that the role has no active sessions and remove any resources used by the role.

To check whether the service-linked role has an active session in the IAM console:

Deleting all of your clusters

To delete a cluster in the Amazon DocumentDB console: