What's the best method for passing AWS credentials as user data to an EC2 instance?

Question

I have a job processing architecture based on AWS that requires EC2 instances query S3 and SQS. In order for running instances to have access to the API the credentials are sen

Answer 1

I'd like to point out that it is not needed to supply any credentials to your EC2 instance anymore. Using IAM, you can create a role for your EC2 instances. In these roles, you can set fine-grained policies that allow your EC2 instance to, for example, get a specific object from a specific S3 bucket and no more. You can read more about IAM Roles in the AWS docs:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/WorkingWithRoles.html