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AWS IAM Roles Anywhere¶
What it is¶
AWS IAM Roles Anywhere extends AWS IAM access to workloads running outside AWS (on-premises servers, EKS Anywhere clusters, other non-AWS compute) without requiring long-term credentials. A workload that already holds an X.509 certificate exchanges it for short-lived AWS credentials — but only if that certificate chains to a trusted source (a registered trust anchor).
Why it matters¶
Storing long-lived AWS access keys at each of hundreds of on-premises sites is a large, standing credential-exposure surface. IAM Roles Anywhere replaces that with certificate-based, short-lived credentials — the workload-identity realization of least-privilege across the cloud/on-prem boundary.
In the hybrid-orchestration reference architecture, on-cluster workloads need to call AWS APIs (send Fluent Bit logs to S3, publish metrics to Managed Prometheus, pull images from ECR). IAM Roles Anywhere issues them short-lived credentials, and the orchestration engine registers each cluster's own CA certificate as its trust anchor when the cluster comes up — so no long-lived keys live at any site. (Source: sources/2026-09-01-aws-hybrid-cloud-orchestration-modernizing-on-premises-infrastructure)
Seen in¶
- sources/2026-09-01-aws-hybrid-cloud-orchestration-modernizing-on-premises-infrastructure — short-lived credentials for on-prem EKS Anywhere workloads, with per-cluster CA certs registered as trust anchors.
Related¶
- systems/aws-iam — the identity substrate this extends beyond AWS.
- systems/aws-private-ca — the managed CA that issues the certificates.
- systems/aws-eks-anywhere — the on-prem workloads that assume roles this way.