When you create an Airflow connection from a Deployment to access cloud resources, Airflow uses your connection details to access those services. You can add credentials to your Airflow connections to authenticate, but it can be risky to add secrets like passwords to your Airflow environment.
To avoid adding secrets to your Airflow connection, you can directly authorize your Astro Deployment to access AWS, GCP, and Azure cloud services using workload identity. Astronomer recommends using a workload identity in most cases to improve security and avoid managing credentials across your Deployments. If you have less strict security requirements, you can still use any of the methods described in Airflow connection guides to manage your connection authorization. This guide explains how to authorize your Deployment to a cloud using workload identity. For each Deployment, you will:
The Astro cluster running your Deployment must be connected to your cloud’s network. See Networking overview.
A workload identity is a Kubernetes service account that provides an identity to your Deployment. The Deployment can use this identity to authenticate to a cloud’s API server, and the cloud can use this identity to authorize the Deployment to access different resources.
You can also use either the Astro CLI or the Astro API to configure workload identity when you create or update a Deployment by providing the AWS ARN value.
See the following pages for more detail:
astro deployment create CLI referenceastro deployment update CLI referenceYou can attach an AWS IAM role to your Deployment to grant the Deployment all of the role’s permissions.
Using IAM roles provides the greatest amount of flexibility for authorizing Deployments to your cloud. For example, you can use existing IAM roles on new Deployments, or your can attach a single IAM role to multiple Deployments that all require the same level of access to your cloud.
To authorize your Deployment, create an IAM role to assign as your Deployment’s workload identity:
Create an IAM role to delegate permissions to in an AWS service. Grant the role any permission that the Deployment will need in your AWS account. Copy the IAM role ARN to use later in this setup.
In the Astro UI, select your Deployment and then click Details. In the Advanced section, click Edit.
In the Workload Identity menu, select Customer Managed Identity.
Enter your IAM role ARN when prompted, then copy and run the provided CLI command. Click Save Configuration to save the IAM role as a selectable configuration.
The command performs the following actions in your AWS account:
sts:AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity. You can view the updated trust policy in the AWS console at IAM > Roles > your role > Trust relationships.The IAM principal that runs the command needs permissions to create OIDC providers and update IAM role trust policies, such as iam:CreateOpenIDConnectProvider, iam:GetRole, and iam:UpdateAssumeRolePolicy. If the command fails, verify these permissions and check the resources listed previously in the AWS console.
Click Update Deployment to apply the selected IAM role to the Deployment.
(Optional) Repeat these steps for each Astro Deployment that needs to access your AWS resources. Or, you can edit the <DeploymentNamespace> value in Condition when setting up the Workload Identity for one of the following scenarios to apply to multiple Deployments.
Available for both Standard and Dedicated clusters. If your organization doesn’t allow you to use a wildcards in your IAM Trust Policies, change the <DeploymentNamespace> value in Condition to specify the Kubernetes service accounts. The following shows an example:
apiserver-serviceaccount is named webserver-serviceaccount.Now that your Deployment is authorized, you can connect it to your cloud using an Airflow connection. Create an Amazon Web Services connection in either the Astro UI or the Airflow UI for your Deployment and specify the following fields:
If you don’t see Amazon Web Services as a connection type in the Airflow UI, ensure you have installed its provider package in your Astro project’s requirements.txt file. See Use Provider in the Airflow Registry for the latest package.
If you use a mix of strategies for managing connections and define the same connection in multiple ways, Airflow uses the following order of precedence:
To grant a Deployment access to a service that is running in an AWS account not managed by Astronomer, use AWS IAM roles to authorize your Deployment’s workload identity. IAM roles on AWS are often used to manage the level of access a specific user, object, or group of users has to a resource, such as Amazon S3 buckets, Redshift instances, and secrets backends.
To authorize your Deployment, create an IAM role that is assumed by the Deployment’s workload identity:
In the Astro UI, select your Deployment and then click Details. Copy the Deployment’s Workload Identity.
In the AWS account that contains your AWS service, create an IAM role. See Creating a role to delegate permissions to an AWS service.
In the AWS Management Console, go to the Identity and Access Management (IAM) dashboard.
Click Roles and in the Role name column, select the role you created in Step 2.
Click Trust relationships.
Click Edit trust policy and paste the workload identity you copied from Step 1 in the trust policy. Your policy should look like the following:
Click Update policy.
Repeat these steps for each Astro Deployment that needs to access your AWS resources.
Now that your Deployment is authorized, you can connect it to your cloud using an Airflow connection. Either create an Amazon Web Services connection in the Astro UI or the Airflow UI for your Deployment and specify the following fields:
Connection Id: Enter a name for the connection.
Extra:
If you don’t see Amazon Web Services as a connection type in the Airflow UI, ensure you have installed its provider package in your Astro project’s requirements.txt file. See Use Provider in the Airflow Registry for the latest package.
If you use a mix of strategies for managing connections, if you define the same connection in multiple ways, Airflow uses the following order of precedence: