I was wondering if its possible to target the services of aws, for example, dynamoDB, from outside of aws, for example, code that runs on my personal computer.
All I could find is creating a mock of dynamodb localy and configuring to it, but not a way to configure the code to target the real thing.
Thanks.
By target I mean to use only the sdk of the language to access the service, not some kind of rest api.
Ok so after more search, and as #JohnRotenstein recommended, I have searched for a way to configure the credentials.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-go/v1/developer-guide/configuring-sdk.html
The link above shows how to configure all the needed credentials.
Of course there is an IAM user with a key and secret key.
Cheers.
Related
I have googled quite heavily the last couple of hours to see if I could use Google Secret Manager from an external service like AWS Lambda or my local PC. I could not find anything helpful, or something that describes properly the steps to do so.
I do not want to play with the APIs and end up doing the authenticating via OAuth myself, I wish to use the client library. How would I go about doing so?
I have so far referred to the following links:
https://cloud.google.com/secret-manager/docs/configuring-secret-manager - Describes setting up secret manager, and prompts you to set up Google Cloud SDK.
https://cloud.google.com/sdk/docs/initializing - Describes setting up the cloud SDK (doesn't seem like I get some kind of config file that helps me to point my client library to the correct GCP project)
The issue I have is that it doesn't seem like I get access to some form of credential that I can use with the client library that consumes the secret manager service of a particular GCP project. Something like a service account token or a means of authenticating and consuming the service from an external environment.
Any help is appreciated, it just feels like I'm missing something. Or is it simply impossible to do so?
PS: Why am I using GCP secret manager when AWS offers a similar service? The latter is too expensive.
I think that your question applies to all GCP services, there isn't anything that is specific to Secret Manager.
As you mentioned, https://cloud.google.com/docs/authentication/getting-started documents how to create and use a Service Account. But this approach has the downside that now you need to figure out to store the service account key (yet another Secret!)
If you're planning to access GCP Secret Manager from AWS you can consider using: https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/configuring-workload-identity-federation#aws which uses identity federation to map an AWS service account to a GCP service account, without the need to store an extra Secret somewhere.
I've been having trouble with a deployment with a serverless-component, so I've been trying to debug it. Stepping through the code, I actually thought I'd be able to step into the component itself and see what was going on.
But to my surprise, I couldn't actually debug it, because the component doesn't actually exist on my computer. Apparently the serverless cli is sending a request to a server, and the request seems to include everything serverless needs to build and deploy the actual service— which includes my AWS credentials...
Is this a well-known thing? Is there a way to force serverless to build and deploy locally? This really caught me be surprise, and to be honest I'm not very happy about it.
I haven't used their platform, (I thought the CLI only executed from your local seems very risky), but you can make this more secure by the following:
First setup an iam role which can only do the deploy actions for your app. Then make a profile which assumes this role when you work on your serverless app and use the cli.
Secondly you can also avoid long-term cli credentials (iam users) by using the AWS SSO functionality which generates cli credentials for an hour, and with the AWS cli, you can login from the cli I believe. What this will mean is that your CLI credentials will live for at maximum 1 hour.
If the requests are always coming from the same IP you can also put that in an IAM policy but I wouldn't imagine there is any guarantee that their IP will always be the same.
So it says on the github documentation here that
AWS Vault is a tool to securely store and access AWS credentials in a
development environment.
AWS Vault stores IAM credentials in your operating system's secure
keystore and then generates temporary credentials from those to expose
to your shell and applications. It's designed to be complementary to
the AWS CLI tools, and is aware of your
But what does this actually mean? As a developer does this mean to create a kind of lock to prevent anyone from using my code without the aws-vault profile? When should I use this technology? I want to know a bit more about it before I use it.
It actually doesn't have anything related to development.
While working with Amazon managed services we can take advantage of IAM roles but that doesn't work when you're doing it from our local environment or from some other Cloud VM like accessing a S3 bucket. It comes handy when you're doing a lot of work with AWS CLI or even writing terraform for your environment. It is just for a precaution so we don't expose or IAM credentials to external world (you will receive an abuse notification from Amazon whenever your keys are compromised). There are many other ways to make sure your keys don't get compromised like before pushing your code to a version control use git-secrets to make sure you don't push any sensitive information.
One thing I dislike about Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is its less baked-in security model around roles/service accounts.
Running locally on my laptop, I need to use the service account's key specified in a JSON file. In AWS, I can just assume a role I have been granted access to assume (without needing to carry around a private key). Is there an analogue to this with GCP?
I am going to try and answer this. I have the AWS Security Specialty (8 AWS certifications) and I know AWS very well. I have been investing a lot of time this year mastering Google Cloud with a focus on authorization and security. I am also an MVP Security for Alibaba Cloud.
AWS has a focus on security and security features that I both admire and appreciate. However, unless you really spend the time to understand all the little details, it is easy to implement poor/broken security in AWS. I can also say the same about Google security. Google has excellent security built into Google Cloud Platform. Google just does it differently and also requires a lot of time to understand all the little features / details.
In AWS, you cannot just assume a role. You need an AWS Access Key first or be authenticated via a service role. Then you can call STS to assume a role. Both AWS and Google make this easy with AWS Access Keys / Google Service Accounts. Whereas AWS uses roles, Google uses roles/scopes. The end result is good in either platform.
Google authentication is based upon OAuth 2.0. AWS authentication is based upon Access Key / Secret Key. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. Both can be either easy to implement (if you understand them well) or a pain to get correct.
The major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Alibaba, Google, IBM) are moving very fast with a constant stream of new features and services. Each one has strengths and weaknesses. Today, there is no platform that offers all the features of the others. AWS today is ahead both in features and market share. Google has a vast number of services that outnumber AWS and I don't know why this is overlooked. The other platforms are catching up quickly and today, you can implement enterprise class solutions and security with any of the cloud platforms.
Today, we would not choose only Microsoft or only Open Source for our application and server infrastructure. In 2019, we will not be chosing only AWS or only Google, etc. for our cloud infrastructure. We will mix and match the best services from each platform for our needs.
As described in the Getting Started with Authentication [1] page, for service accounts it is needed the key file in order to authenticate.
From [2]: You can authenticate to a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) API using service accounts or user accounts, and for APIs that don't require authentication, you can use API keys.
Service and user accounts needs the key file to authenticate. Taking this information into account, there is no manner to locally authenticate without using a key file.
Links:
[1] https://cloud.google.com/docs/authentication/getting-started
[2] https://cloud.google.com/docs/authentication/
my company provides me with a federated access to AWS. By that I mean, we're going to a website where we login with our SSO which then allows us to pull up the AWS console (i.e. through as custom federation broker as described here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_roles_providers_enable-console-custom-url.html)
I can create instances (ec2) just fine through the UI. My question is, how can I get API credentials to use with aws cli?
In the IAM dashboard I don't see an option to create a credential set for myself.
Is this even something I can get to, or do they (=my it people) need to change something in the setup?
Thanks a bunch!
ps. to clarify, this we're not going through onelogin
You can create a program to do this leveraging your credentials, your SSO config, and boto3.
Alternatively, I use this google chrome plugin: https://github.com/prolane/samltoawsstskeys/blob/master/README.md
Atlassian also released a tool recently to help solve this problem, and there are some other ones out there if you do some searching.