aws-cloudformation-github-deploy VS configure-aws-credentials

With the authentication in order, it's time to trigger the Cloudformation creation/update. aws-cloudformation-github-deploy action is used for that. Although the action was archived, it stills works just fine, so I'll keep it for now. This action will deploy our aws/app-template.yaml stack, which has the configuration to build and run the service, as well as its resource usage.

The AWS configure-aws-credentials Github Action allows the connection to the AWS S3 bucket through an AWS Role. The configuration of this role is explained in the next chapter

In this example, we'll be using the aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials action with GitHub's OIDC provider. Make sure the configured role has the required permissions.

The first step is to set up GitHub Actions as a recognized identity provider in my AWS account. This is also called an "OIDC Trust" relationship. In AWS IAM, create an Identity Provider with GitHub's provider URL and Audience. I am using the open-source action configure-aws-credentials (link) which means I want to use an Audience value of sts.amazonaws.com. Be sure to click the "Get Thumbprint" button to save a copy of the x.509 certificate used by GitHub into the AWS identity provider.

You can use configure-aws-credentials Github aciton. Which is pretty good. Here is a blog post about it from AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/use-iam-roles-to-connect-github-actions-to-actions-in-aws/

We are now ready to utilize configure-aws-credentials within our GitHub Actions as we move onto deploying our code!

The AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity error manifests itself mostly around parallel access attempts, and how the various AWS interfaces are able to authenticate, as well as run and deploy services. We started encountering this issue when running our pipelines for deployment, and attempting to authenticate our Github account to AWS via the OIDC plugin. This is a well-known (and widely discussed) limitation for authentication to AWS for web application providers. In our case it was Github, but this is true for pretty much any web application integration.

What you are looking at is totally doable, you MUST use: https://github.com/aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials

AWS Actions: It's an open source project from AWS which the goal is to get easy to Configure AWS credential and region environment variables for use in other GitHub Actions.

In order to achieve this, AWS credentials need to be properly configured. Here we use a handy Github action called configure-aws-credential, from AWS itself. You can also read more about the many methods of authentication available. This step requires the AWS_REGION and AWS_ROLE_ARN secrets to be properly configured in the repo, both of which that should be shared by the platform team.