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unusual roles , cost explorer charges

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I incurred charges for cost explorer, I saw there were some unusual roles with names like these: PumpAutoPilotRole-x6aff134cdf8643-CrossAccountRole-NIQF6BD4I7I PumpReadOnlyRole-9b392960861e4eed-CrossAccountRole-R31OOJR2CTEJ These were showing as active a few hours ago. What are these and how might they have been used? I am not really aware of these roles. I have now deleted both of these. I still see two roles, AWSServiceRoleForSupport and AWSServiceRoleForTrustedAdvisor, here which I am unable to delete: https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?region=us-east-1#/roles. I hope these roles won't be causing any charges. would they? --- 1 I want to know if there is any kind of service, API, or other activity that may cause any charges in the future under my account? --- 2

asked 2 years ago292 views
1 Answer
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Accepted Answer

The roles related to "pump" don't sound like anything standard in AWS, but in general, you can usually get an idea of what they do in two ways: first, look at the trust policy of the role. Especially if the role is used by an AWS service, you'll usually see its name as the "Service" in the "Principal" element. If it's a custom cross-account role, as the case might be for the "pump" roles, you'll usually see the AWS account ID from where the role is allowed to be assumed.

Secondly, look at the permissions policies attached to the role. Unless the policy is overly permissive, it will usually show at least which services are used, and potentially in greater detail which exact resources, such as S3 buckets or SQS queues, are used by whoever is using the role.

You can also see on the "access advisor" tab of the role which services it has recently been used to access, even when the policy is excessively permissive and non-specific.

AWSServiceRoleForSupport is for AWS's support team to access your environment if you ask them to assist. It won't involve any notable costs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awssupport/latest/user/using-service-linked-roles-sup.html

AWSServiceRoleForTrustedAdvisor is used by Trusted Advisor (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awssupport/latest/user/using-service-linked-roles-ta.html), which gives you suggestions on potential suboptimal or incorrect configurations in your environment that might improve your security, decrease costs, or otherwise be beneficial for you to look into and possibly remedy.

Neither of those AWSServiceRole* roles will incur any notable charges. Support might look around your environment and incur tiny costs for a small number of API calls, but it would probably round down to zero cents in your bill.

EXPERT
answered 2 years ago
EXPERT
reviewed 2 years ago

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