Until today, you had to register an Amazon Access Key with Skeddly in order for Skeddly to perform actions on your AWS resources. Access Keys are still supported, but a new, preferred, way has been added to Skeddly: IAM roles.
IAM Roles are more secure than Access Keys. Access Keys can be used by anyone who gets access to them. On the other hand, for IAM Roles, once a trusted relationship has been established between Skeddly and your AWS account, only Skeddly can access your account. AWS ensures this. Establishing this trusted relationship between Skeddly and your AWS account is a little more involved than creating Access Keys, but it’s worth it.
Because we now support 2 mechanisms for accessing AWS accounts, we’ve renamed our “Access Keys” tab to “Credentials”. We’ve also added a little more guidance to assist in the creation of IAM Roles and Access Keys, as well as, guiding users to the IAM Policy Generator to create a restricted IAM policy document for their credentials. We hope the new guidance is well received by both new users as well as established users.
As always, if you choose to use Access Keys, please do not use Access Keys for your master AWS account. Please create an IAM user dedicated for Skeddly.
We welcome any feedback, both positive and negative, of the new feature or guidance.