Granting cross-account access - Amazon Glue
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).

Granting cross-account access

Granting access to Data Catalog resources across accounts enables your extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs to query and join data from different accounts.

Methods for granting cross-account access in Amazon Glue

You can grant access to your data to external Amazon accounts by using Amazon Glue methods or by using Amazon Lake Formation cross-account grants. The Amazon Glue methods use Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to achieve fine-grained access control. Lake Formation uses a simpler GRANT/REVOKE permissions model similar to the GRANT/REVOKE commands in a relational database system.

This section describes using the Amazon Glue methods. For information about using Lake Formation cross-account grants, see Granting Lake Formation Permissions in the Amazon Lake Formation Developer Guide.

There are two Amazon Glue methods for granting cross-account access to a resource:

  • Use a Data Catalog resource policy

  • Use an IAM role

Granting cross-account access using a resource policy

The following are the general steps for granting cross-account access using a Data Catalog resource policy:

  1. An administrator (or other authorized identity) in Account A attaches a resource policy to the Data Catalog in Account A. This policy grants Account B specific cross-account permissions to perform operations on a resource in Account A's catalog.

  2. An administrator in Account B attaches an IAM policy to an IAM identity in Account B that delegates the permissions received from Account A.

    The identity in Account B now has access to the specified resource in Account A.

    The identity needs permission from both the resource owner (Account A) and their parent account (Account B) to be able to access the resource.

Granting cross-account access using an IAM role

The following are the general steps for granting cross-account access using an IAM role:

  1. An administrator (or other authorized identity) in the account that owns the resource (Account A) creates an IAM role.

  2. The administrator in Account A attaches a policy to the role that grants cross-account permissions for access to the resource in question.

  3. The administrator in Account A attaches a trust policy to the role that identifies an IAM identity in a different account (Account B) as the principal who can assume the role.

    The principal in the trust policy can also be an Amazon service principal if you want to grant an Amazon service permission to assume the role.

  4. An administrator in Account B now delegates permissions to one or more IAM identities in Account B so that they can assume that role. Doing so gives those identities in Account B access to the resource in account A.

For more information about using IAM to delegate permissions, see Access management in the IAM User Guide. For more information about users, groups, roles, and permissions, see Identities (users, groups, and roles) in the IAM User Guide.

For a comparison of these two approaches, see How IAM roles differ from resource-based policies in the IAM User Guide. Amazon Glue supports both options, with the restriction that a resource policy can grant access only to Data Catalog resources.

For example, to give the Dev role in Account B access to database db1 in Account A, attach the following resource policy to the catalog in Account A.

{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "glue:GetDatabase" ], "Principal": {"AWS": [ "arn:aws-cn:iam::account-B-id:role/Dev" ]}, "Resource": [ "arn:aws:glue:us-east-1:account-A-id:catalog", "arn:aws:glue:us-east-1:account-A-id:database/db1" ] } ] }

In addition, Account B would have to attach the following IAM policy to the Dev role before it would actually get access to db1 in Account A.

{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "glue:GetDatabase" ], "Resource": [ "arn:aws:glue:us-east-1:account-A-id:catalog", "arn:aws:glue:us-east-1:account-A-id:database/db1" ] } ] }

Adding or updating the Data Catalog resource policy

You can add or update the Amazon Glue Data Catalog resource policy using the console, API, or Amazon Command Line Interface (Amazon CLI).

Important

If you have already made cross-account permission grants from your account with Amazon Lake Formation, adding or updating the Data Catalog resource policy requires an extra step. For more information, see Managing cross-account permissions using both Amazon Glue and Lake Formation in the Amazon Lake Formation Developer Guide.

To determine if Lake Formation cross-account grants exist, use the glue:GetResourcePolicies API operation or the Amazon CLI. If glue:GetResourcePolicies returns any policies other than an already existing Data Catalog policy, then Lake Formation grants exist. For more information, see Viewing all cross-account grants using the GetResourcePolicies API operation in the Amazon Lake Formation Developer Guide.

To add or update the Data Catalog resource policy (console)
  1. Open the Amazon Glue console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/glue/.

    Sign in as an Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) administrative user who has the glue:PutResourcePolicy permission.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Settings.

  3. On the Data catalog settings page, under Permissions, paste a resource policy into the text area. Then choose Save.

    If the console displays a alert stating that the permissions in the policy will be in addition to any permissions granted using Lake Formation, choose Proceed.

To add or update the Data Catalog resource policy (Amazon CLI)
  • Submit an aws glue put-resource-policy command. If Lake Formation grants already exist, ensure that you include the --enable-hybrid option with the value 'TRUE'.

    For examples of using this command, see Resource-based policy examples for Amazon Glue.

Making a cross-account API call

All Amazon Glue Data Catalog operations have a CatalogId field. If the required permissions have been granted to enable cross-account access, a caller can make Data Catalog API calls across accounts. The caller does this by passing the target Amazon account ID in CatalogId so as to access the resource in that target account.

If no CatalogId value is provided, Amazon Glue uses the caller's own account ID by default, and the call is not cross-account.

Making a cross-account ETL call

Some Amazon Glue PySpark and Scala APIs have a catalog ID field. If all the required permissions have been granted to enable cross-account access, an ETL job can make PySpark and Scala calls to API operations across accounts by passing the target Amazon account ID in the catalog ID field to access Data Catalog resources in a target account.

If no catalog ID value is provided, Amazon Glue uses the caller's own account ID by default, and the call is not cross-account.

For PySpark APIs that support catalog_id, see GlueContext class. For Scala APIs that support catalogId, see Amazon Glue Scala GlueContext APIs.

The following example shows the permissions required by the grantee to run an ETL job. In this example, grantee-account-id is the catalog-id of the client running the job and grantor-account-id is the owner of the resource. This example grants permission to all catalog resources in the grantor's account. To limit the scope of resources granted, you can provide specific ARNs for the catalog, database, table, and connection.

{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "glue:GetConnection", "glue:GetDatabase", "glue:GetTable", "glue:GetPartition" ], "Principal": {"AWS": ["arn:aws-cn:iam::grantee-account-id:root"]}, "Resource": [ "arn:aws:glue:us-east-1:grantor-account-id:*" ] } ] }
Note

If a table in the grantor's account points to an Amazon S3 location that is also in the grantor's account, the IAM role used to run an ETL job in the grantee's account must have permission to list and get objects from the grantor's account.

Given that the client in Account A already has permission to create and run ETL jobs, the following are the basic steps to set up an ETL job for cross-account access:

  1. Allow cross-account data access (skip this step if Amazon S3 cross-account access is already set up).

    1. Update the Amazon S3 bucket policy in Account B to allow cross-account access from Account A.

    2. Update the IAM policy in Account A to allow access to the bucket in Account B.

  2. Allow cross-account Data Catalog access.

    1. Create or update the resource policy attached to the Data Catalog in Account B to allow access from Account A.

    2. Update the IAM policy in Account A to allow access to the Data Catalog in Account B.

Cross-account CloudTrail logging

When an Amazon Glue extract, transform, and load (ETL) job accesses the underlying data of a Data Catalog table shared through Amazon Lake Formation cross-account grants, there is additional Amazon CloudTrail logging behavior.

For purposes of this discussion, the Amazon account that shared the table is the owner account, and the account that the table was shared with is the recipient account. When an ETL job in the recipient account accesses data in the table in the owner account, the data-access CloudTrail event that is added to the logs for the recipient account gets copied to the owner account's CloudTrail logs. This is so owner accounts can track data accesses by the various recipient accounts. By default, the CloudTrail events do not include a human-readable principal identifier (principal ARN). An administrator in the recipient account can opt in to include the principal ARN in the logs.

For more information, see Cross-account CloudTrail logging in the Amazon Lake Formation Developer Guide.

Cross-account resource ownership and billing

When a user in one Amazon account (Account A) creates a new resource such as a database in a different account (Account B), that resource is then owned by Account B, the account where it was created. An administrator in Account B automatically gets full permissions to access the new resource, including reading, writing, and granting access permissions to a third account. The user in Account A can access the resource that they just created only if they have the appropriate permissions granted by Account B.

Storage costs and other costs that are directly associated with the new resource are billed to Account B, the resource owner. The cost of requests from the user who created the resource are billed to the requester's account, Account A.

For more information about Amazon Glue billing and pricing, see How Amazon Pricing Works.

Cross-account access limitations

Amazon Glue cross-account access has the following limitations:

  • Cross-account access to Amazon Glue is not allowed if you created databases and tables using Amazon Athena orAmazon Redshift Spectrum prior to a region's support for Amazon Glue and the resource owner account has not migrated the Amazon Athena data catalog to Amazon Glue. You can find the current migration status using the GetCatalogImportStatus (get_catalog_import_status). For more details on how to migrate an Athena catalog to Amazon Glue, see Upgrading to the Amazon Glue Data Catalog step-by-step in the Amazon Athena User Guide.

  • Cross-account access is only supported for Data Catalog resources, including databases, tables, user-defined functions, and connections.

  • Cross-account access to the Data Catalog from Athena requires you to register the catalog as an Athena DataCatalog resource. For instructions, see Registering an Amazon Glue Data Catalog from another account in the Amazon Athena User Guide.