Signing requests to Amazon Elasticsearch service

When using Amazon Elasticsearch service, you need to secure your Elasticsearch from the outside. Currently, there is no way to secure your Elasticsearch using network firewall rules, so the only way is to signing the requests using the access key and secret key for a role or user with permissions on the Elasticsearch service.

You can sign requests to AWS using any of the standard AWS methods of providing credentials. - Environment Variables, AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY - AWS Config or Credential Files, ~/.aws/config and ~/.aws/credentials - AWS Instance Profiles, uses the EC2 Metadata service

Using an Instance Profile

Typically, you’ll deploy ElastAlert on a running EC2 instance on AWS. You can assign a role to this instance that gives it permissions to read from and write to the Elasticsearch service. When using an Instance Profile, you will need to specify the aws_region in the configuration file or set the AWS_DEFAULT_REGION environment variable.

Using AWS profiles

You can also create a user with permissions on the Elasticsearch service and tell ElastAlert to authenticate itself using that user. First, create an AWS profile in the machine where you’d like to run ElastAlert for the user with permissions.

You can use the environment variables AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE and AWS_DEFAULT_REGION or add two options to the configuration file: - aws_region: The AWS region where you want to operate. - profile: The name of the AWS profile to use to sign the requests.