How can I use my IAM role credentials or switch to another IAM role when connecting to Athena using the JDBC driver?

Resolution

Use IAM role credentials to connect to the Athena JDBC driver

Retrieve the role's temporary credentials. The process for retrieving the temporary credentials depends on how you assume the role.

• Assuming the role with a SAML Identity provider: Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 3.0, Okta, PingFederate, and Azure AD are the only SAML 2.0 identity providers that are directly supported in the Athena JDBC driver. If you assume the role with a different identity provider, then use the assume-role-with-saml command to get the temporary credentials.
• Assuming a different role in your account: If you assume another role in the same AWS account, then use assume-role to get the temporary credentials.

Note: If you receive errors when running AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) commands, make sure that you’re using the most recent AWS CLI version.

For more information, see Using IAM roles and review the Comparing methods for using roles table.

The temporary credentials contain the session token, access key ID, and secret access key. These three credentials are required for authenticating the JDBC connection to Athena. Keep in mind that the temporary credentials have a maximum lifespan of 12 hours.

1.    On the machine where the Athena JDBC driver is installed, save the temporary credentials to the AWS credentials file ( ~/.aws/credentials) as a named profile. For more information, see Configuration and credential file settings.

Here's an example of temporary credentials that are stored in an AWS CLI profile named testprofile:

[testprofile]
aws_access_key_id=ASIAXXXXXXXXX
aws_secret_access_key=XXXXXXXX
aws_session_token=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

2.    To connect to Athena with the JDBC driver, specify the profile name in the JDBC connection string (for example: jdbc:awsathena://AwsRegion=us-west-2;Profile=testprofile;). Or, set the profile name in Profile JDBC configuration property.

Note: The Profile JDBC configuration property is available in Athena JDBC driver versions 2.0.6 and later. To get the latest JDBC driver, see Links for downloading the JDBC driver.

Switch to a different IAM role and then connect to the Athena JDBC driver

To switch roles before connecting to the Athena JDBC driver, use the source_profile option in the named profile:

1.    On the machine where the Athena JDBC driver is installed, add a named profile to the AWS CLI credentials file (~/.aws/credentials). For more information about creating named profiles, see Named profiles. The profile must include these properties:

role_arn: the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the role that you want to assume
source_profile: a profile that contains the credentials of an IAM user or an IAM role that has permissions to assume the role

For example, to assume a role named testrole that has the ARN arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/testrole, create a named profile like this:

[switchroletest]
role_arn=arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/testrole
source_profile=default

In this example, the default profile contains the credentials of an IAM user or role with permissions to assume testrole:

[default]
aws_access_key_id=ASIAXXXXXXXXX
aws_secret_access_key=XXXXXXXX
aws_session_token=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Note: AWS CLI supports specifying source_profile in the AWS CLI config file (/.aws/config) and user credentials in a separate AWS CLI credentials file (/.aws/credentials). However, the Athena JDBC driver supports reading credentials only from the AWS CLI credentials file. Because of this limitation, the profiles in the preceding examples must be placed in the same AWS CLI credentials file (~/.aws/credentials) and shouldn't be prefixed with profile. The Athena JDBC driver doesn't support using credential_source = Ec2InstanceMetadata in named profiles.

2.    To connect to Athena with the JDBC driver, specify the profile name in the JDBC connection string (for example: jdbc:awsathena://AwsRegion=us-west-2;Profile=switchroletest;). Or, set the profile name in Profile JDBC configuration property.

Related information

Requesting temporary security credentials

Simba Athena JDBC driver with SQL connector installation and configuration guide (version 2.0.9)

Switching to an IAM role (AWS CLI)

Using an IAM role in the AWS CLI