Turn on/off EC2 instance without any permission to AWS account

Question

I have an AWS account and I bring someone access to one EC2 instance, all he has is only a pem file and the username and host. So he can connect with ssh without any AWS account.

I want to give him an option to turn on/off the instance. I can do it with AWS-CLI but I use my secret key for it and I don't want to give it to him.

I thought maybe to run a little instance with AWS-CLI with my secret key and enable him to do it with some website run on this little instance such that he will have a UI system via the browser and he will click on the button POWER ON and this is will run the right command with AWS-CLI Is there any tool I can do it simply?

Thanks

Answer 1

I thought maybe to run a little instance with AWS-CLI with my secret key and enable him to do it with some website run on this little instance such that he will have a UI system via the browser and he will click on the button POWER ON and this is will run the right command with AWS-CLI Is there any tool I can do it simply?

That is certainly possible, but you would have to write some custom code, build that custom website, etc..

An easier method would be to simply create an IAM user in your AWS account, with only API access, and only give it an IAM policy that lets them start and stop that one instance.

Answer 2

You could create an API Gateway linked to an AWS Lambda function . Then, create a static web page in Amazon S3 that simply contains two links -- one for turning ON the instance, the other for turning OFF the instance.

The user could go to that page and click the appropriate link. This would trigger the AWS Lambda function, which can call StartInstances() or StopInstances() to control the instance.

This would not be a suitable solution for a commercial service because you would need authentication, but it is sufficient for use by a single 'trusted' user.

Answer 3

This is a simple example of how I did it: