Most Secure Way to Enable Docker Containers to Interact with DynamoDB

Answer - A.

The AWS Documentation mentions the following.

With IAM roles for Amazon ECS tasks, you can specify an IAM role that the containers in a task can use.

Applications must sign their AWS API requests with AWS credentials.

This feature provides a strategy for managing credentials for your applications to use, similar to how Amazon EC2 instance profiles provide credentials to EC2 instances.

Instead of creating and distributing your AWS credentials to the containers or using the EC2 instance's role, you can associate an IAM role with an ECS task definition or RunTask API operation.

The applications in the task's containers can then use the AWS SDK or CLI to make API requests to authorized AWS services.

All other options are invalid since the most secure way is to use IAM Roles for accessing AWS services.

For more information on IAM Roles for tasks, please refer to the below URL-

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/task-iam-roles.html

The most secure way to ensure that Docker containers in Elastic Container Service can interact with DynamoDB tables is to create an IAM Role for the ECS Tasks, which can be assigned to the task definition of the container. Option A is the correct answer.

Option B, embedding access keys in the containers, is not secure because anyone with access to the container can retrieve the keys and use them to access DynamoDB.

Option C, embedding access keys in the cluster, is also not secure because anyone with access to the cluster can retrieve the keys and use them to access DynamoDB.

Option D, using an IAM user's credentials to spin up the cluster, is not secure because the IAM user's credentials can be compromised, and anyone with access to the credentials can access DynamoDB.

By creating an IAM role for the ECS tasks, you can grant the necessary permissions to access DynamoDB without embedding any access keys or using an IAM user's credentials. The IAM role can be assigned to the task definition of the container, and the ECS service will automatically generate temporary security credentials for the task to use when interacting with DynamoDB. This way, the access keys are not stored in the container or the cluster, and the security credentials are automatically rotated, making it more secure.

In summary, option A, creating an IAM role for ECS tasks, is the most secure way to ensure that Docker containers in Elastic Container Service can interact with DynamoDB.