Configuring different AWS profiles for Serverless deployment

To deploy our application serverless we need an IAM role that has AWS credentials that consist of AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, SECRET_ACCESS_KEY and other optional fields.

We need to use aws cli to configure settings related to accounts. Our credentials are stored in ~/.aws/credentials and are used by the Serverless framework while deploying an application.

There are cases where we need to configure multiple credentials configured to deploy different applications with specific credentials.

Let’s jump onto doing things and you will be able to configure multiple AWS credentials.

Create a new AWS profile:

If you want to create a new AWS profile, you can follow Create an IAM User to create an IAM user in an AWS account and you will get Access key ID and Secret access key.

Now let’s create a new profile in CLI using:

aws configure --profile profileName

• name profileName as per your choice. (This name is what you will be using to deploy)
• You can leave region name and output format empty.

This will create a new profile that you can use now to deploy a serverless application.

Setting profile while deploying:

AWS CLI provides us the option to choose a profile while deploying an application using --aws-profile with serverless deploy

$> serverles deploy --aws-profile profileName

This application will be deployed using the new profile that we created now.

If you don’t want to specify a profile name every time you are deploying, another option is to specify it in serverless.yml

service: messaging-service // this can be your service name
provider:
  name: aws
  stage: test
  profile: profileName

Here profile tells serverless to deploy using the profile specified as value.

Note:
Setting a profile in serverless.yml is not recommended because if you are working with others then everyone will have to create the same profile locally.

Giving freedom to others to name their profile is better 😉.

Setting profile per stage:

There are some cases where we want to split our profiles for different staging environments to control access to IAM roles.

e.g: If we have a profile by prodAWSto deploy code in production you would:

$ serverless deploy --stage prod --aws-profile prodAWS

And to deploy to the staging environment you would:

$ serverless deploy --stage dev --aws-profile devAWS

Here, prodAWS and devAWS are the AWS profiles for the production and staging environment respectively.

I hope you found this post helpful, please comment below if anyone faces any challenges doing this.
Happy to help and open to suggestions. 😁