Overview of managing access permissions to your Amazon Redshift resources
Every Amazon resource is owned by an Amazon account, and permissions to create or access the resources are governed by permissions policies. An account administrator can attach permissions policies to IAM identities (that is, users, groups, and roles), and some services (such as Amazon Lambda) also support attaching permissions policies to resources.
Note
An account administrator (or administrator user) is a user with administrator privileges. For more information, see IAM best practices in the IAM User Guide.
When granting permissions, you decide who is getting the permissions, which resources they get permissions for, and the specific actions that you want to allow on those resources.
Amazon Redshift resources and operations
Amazon Redshift provides service-specific resources, actions, and condition context keys for use in IAM permission policies.
Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Serverless, Amazon Redshift Data API, and Amazon Redshift query editor v2 access permissions
When you set up Access control, you write permission policies that you can attach to an IAM identity (identity-based policies). For detailed reference information, see the following topics in the Service Authorization Reference:
-
For Amazon Redshift, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon Redshift that use the
redshift:
prefix. -
For Amazon Redshift Serverless, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon Redshift Serverless that use the
redshift-serverless:
prefix. -
For Amazon Redshift Data API, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon Redshift Data API that use the
redshift-data:
prefix. -
For Amazon Redshift query editor v2, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon SQL Workbench (Amazon Redshift query editor v2) that use the
sqlworkbench:
prefix.The query editor v2 includes permission-only actions that don't directly correspond to an API operation. These actions are indicated in the Service Authorization Reference with
[permission only]
.
The Service Authorization Reference contains information about which API operations can be used in an IAM policy. It also includes the Amazon resource for which you can grant the permissions, and condition keys that you can include for fine-grained access control. For more information about conditions, see Using IAM policy conditions for fine-grained access control.
You specify the actions in the policy's Action
field, the resource value
in the policy's Resource
field, and conditions in the policy's
Condition
field. To specify an action for Amazon Redshift, use the
redshift:
prefix followed by the API operation name (for example,
redshift:CreateCluster
).
Understanding resource ownership
A resource owner is the Amazon account that created a resource. That is, the resource owner is the Amazon account of the principal entity (the root account, an IAM user, or an IAM role) that authenticates the request that creates the resource. The following examples illustrate how this works:
-
If you use the root account credentials of your Amazon account to create a DB cluster, your Amazon account is the owner of the Amazon Redshift resource.
-
If you create an IAM role in your Amazon account with permissions to create Amazon Redshift resources, anyone who can assume the role can create Amazon Redshift resources. Your Amazon account, to which the role belongs, owns the Amazon Redshift resources.
-
If you create an IAM user in your Amazon account and grant permissions to create Amazon Redshift resources to that user, the user can create Amazon Redshift resources. However, your Amazon account, to which the user belongs, owns the Amazon Redshift resources. In most cases this method isn't recommended. We recommend creating an IAM role and attaching permissions to the role, then assigning the role to a user.
Managing access to resources
A permissions policy describes who has access to what. The following section explains the available options for creating permissions policies.
Note
This section discusses using IAM in the context of Amazon Redshift. It doesn't provide detailed information about the IAM service. For complete IAM documentation, see What is IAM? in the IAM User Guide. For information about IAM policy syntax and descriptions, see Amazon IAM policy reference in the IAM User Guide.
Policies attached to an IAM identity are referred to as identity-based policies (IAM policies) and policies attached to a resource are referred to as resource-based policies. Amazon Redshift supports only identity-based policies (IAM policies).
Identity-based policies (IAM policies)
You can assign permissions by attaching polices to an IAM role and then assigning that role to a user or group. The following is an example policy that containing permissions to create, delete, modify, and reboot Amazon Redshift clusters for your Amazon account.
{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Sid":"AllowManageClusters", "Effect":"Allow", "Action": [ "redshift:CreateCluster", "redshift:DeleteCluster", "redshift:ModifyCluster", "redshift:RebootCluster" ], "Resource":"*" } ] }
For more information about using identity-based policies with Amazon Redshift, see Using identity-based policies (IAM policies) for Amazon Redshift. For more information about users, groups, roles, and permissions, see Identities (users, groups, and roles) in the IAM User Guide.
Resource-based policies
Other services, such as Amazon S3, also support resource-based permissions policies. For example, you can attach a policy to an S3 bucket to manage access permissions to that bucket. Amazon Redshift doesn't support resource-based policies.
Specifying policy elements: Actions, effects, resources, and principals
For each Amazon Redshift resource (see Amazon Redshift resources and operations), the service defines a set of API operations (see Actions). To grant permissions for these API operations, Amazon Redshift defines a set of actions that you can specify in a policy. Performing an API operation can require permissions for more than one action.
The following are the basic policy elements:
-
Resource – In a policy, you use an Amazon Resource Name (ARN) to identify the resource to which the policy applies. For more information, see Amazon Redshift resources and operations.
-
Action – You use action keywords to identify resource operations that you want to allow or deny. For example, the
redshift:DescribeClusters
permission allows the user permissions to perform the Amazon RedshiftDescribeClusters
operation. -
Effect – You specify the effect when the user requests the specific action—this can be either allow or deny. If you don't explicitly grant access to (allow) a resource, access is implicitly denied. You can also explicitly deny access to a resource, which you might do to make sure that a user cannot access it, even if a different policy grants access.
-
Principal – In identity-based policies (IAM policies), the user that the policy is attached to is the implicit principal. For resource-based policies, you specify the user, account, service, or other entity that you want to receive permissions (applies to resource-based policies only). Amazon Redshift doesn't support resource-based policies.
To learn more about IAM policy syntax and descriptions, see Amazon IAM policy reference in the IAM User Guide.
For a table showing all of the Amazon Redshift API actions and the resources that they apply to, see Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Serverless, Amazon Redshift Data API, and Amazon Redshift query editor v2 access permissions.
Specifying conditions in a policy
When you grant permissions, you can use the access policy language to specify the conditions when a policy should take effect. For example, you might want a policy to be applied only after a specific date. For more information about specifying conditions in an access policy language, see IAM JSON policy elements: Condition in the IAM User Guide.
To identify conditions where a permissions policy applies, include a
Condition
element in your IAM permissions policy. For example, you can
create a policy that permits a user to create a cluster using the
redshift:CreateCluster
action, and you can add a Condition
element to restrict that user to only create the cluster in a specific region. For details,
see Using IAM policy conditions for
fine-grained access control. For a list showing all of
condition key values and the Amazon Redshift actions and resources that they apply to, see Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Serverless,
Amazon Redshift Data API, and Amazon Redshift query editor v2 access permissions.
Using IAM policy conditions for fine-grained access control
In Amazon Redshift, you can use condition keys to restrict access to resources based on the tags for those resources. The following are common Amazon Redshift condition keys.
Condition key | Description |
---|---|
|
Requires users to include a tag key (name) and value whenever they create a resource. For more information, see aws:RequestTag in the IAM User Guide. |
|
Restricts user access to resources based on specific tag keys and values. For more information, see aws:ResourceTag in the IAM User Guide. |
|
Use this key to compare the tag keys in a request with the keys that you specify in the policy. For more information, see aws:TagKeys in the IAM User Guide. |
For information on tags, see Tag resources in Amazon Redshift.
For a list of the API actions that support the redshift:RequestTag
and
redshift:ResourceTag
condition keys, see Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Serverless,
Amazon Redshift Data API, and Amazon Redshift query editor v2 access permissions.
The following condition keys can be used with the Amazon Redshift GetClusterCredentials action.
Condition key | Description |
---|---|
|
Limits the number of seconds that can be specified for duration. |
|
Restricts database names that can be specified. |
|
Restricts database user names that can be specified. |
Example 1: Restricting access by using the aws:ResourceTag condition key
Use the following IAM policy to let a user modify an Amazon Redshift cluster only for a
specific Amazon account in the us-west-2
region with a tag named
environment
with a tag value of test
.
{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": { "Sid":"AllowModifyTestCluster", "Effect": "Allow", "Action": "redshift:ModifyCluster", "Resource": "arn:aws:redshift:us-west-2:123456789012:cluster:*", "Condition": { "StringEquals": { "aws:ResourceTag/environment": "test" } } } }
Example 2: Restricting access by using the aws:RequestTag condition key
Use the following IAM policy to let a user create an Amazon Redshift cluster only if the
command to create the cluster includes a tag named usage
and a tag value of
production
. The condition with aws:TagKeys
and the
ForAllValues
modifier specifies that only the keys
costcenter
and usage
can be specified in the request.
{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": { "Sid":"AllowCreateProductionCluster", "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "redshift:CreateCluster", "redshift:CreateTags" ], "Resource": "*", "Condition": { "StringEquals": { "aws:RequestTag/usage": "production" }, "ForAllValues:StringEquals": { "aws:TagKeys": [ "costcenter", "usage" ] } } } }