Route53

This guide explains how to set up an Issuer, or ClusterIssuer, to use Amazon Route53 to solve DNS01 ACME challenges. It’s advised you read the DNS01 Challenge Provider page first for a more general understanding of how cert-manager handles DNS01 challenges.

Note: This guide assumes that your cluster is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and that you already have a hosted zone in Route53.

Set up an IAM Role

cert-manager needs to be able to add records to Route53 in order to solve the DNS01 challenge. To enable this, create a IAM policy with the following permissions:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": "route53:GetChange",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:route53:::change/*"
    },
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "route53:ChangeResourceRecordSets",
        "route53:ListResourceRecordSets"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:route53:::hostedzone/*"
    },
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": "route53:ListHostedZonesByName",
      "Resource": "*"
    }
  ]
}

Note: The route53:ListHostedZonesByName statement can be removed if you specify the (optional) hostedZoneID. You can further tighten the policy by limiting the hosted zone that cert-manager has access to (e.g. arn:aws:route53:::hostedzone/DIKER8JEXAMPLE).

Credentials

You have two options for the set up - either create a user or a role and attach that policy from above. Using a role is considered best practice because you do not have to store permanent credentials in a secret.

cert-manager supports two ways of specifying credentials:

explicit by providing a accessKeyID and secretAccessKey
or implicit (using metadata service or environment variables or credentials file.

cert-manager also supports specifying a role to enable cross-account access and/or limit the access of cert-manager. Integration with kiam and kube2iam should work out of the box.

Cross Account Access

Example: Account Y manages Route53 DNS Zones. Now you want cert-manager running in Account X (or many other accounts) to be able to manage records in Route53 zones hosted in Account Y.

First, create a role with the permissions policy above (let’s call the role dns-manager) in Account Y, and attach a trust relationship like the one below.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::XXXXXXXXXXX:role/cert-manager"
      },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole"
    }
  ]
}

Bear in mind, that you won’t be able to define this policy until cert-manager role on account Y is created. If you are setting this up using a configuration language, you may want to define principal as:

"Principal": {
        "AWS": "XXXXXXXXXXX"
      }

And restrict it, in a future step, after all the roles are created.

This allows the role cert-manager in Account X to assume the dns-manager role in Account Y to manage the Route53 DNS zones in Account Y. For more information visit the official documentation.

Second, create the cert-manager role in Account X; this will be used as a credentials source for the cert-manager pods running in Account X. Attach to the role the following permissions policy:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:iam::YYYYYYYYYYYY:role/dns-manager",
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole"
    }
  ]
}

And the following trust relationship (Add AWS Services as needed):

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "Service": "ec2.amazonaws.com"
      },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole"
    }
  ]
}

Creating an Issuer (or `ClusterIssuer`)

Here is an example configuration for a ClusterIssuer:

apiVersion: cert-manager.io/v1
kind: ClusterIssuer
metadata:
  name: letsencrypt-prod
spec:
  acme:
    ...
    solvers:

    # example: cross-account zone management for example.com
    # this solver uses ambient credentials (i.e. inferred from the environment or EC2 Metadata Service)
    # to assume a role in a different account
    - selector:
        dnsZones:
          - "example.com"
      dns01:
        route53:
          region: us-east-1
          hostedZoneID: DIKER8JEXAMPLE # optional, see policy above
          role: arn:aws:iam::YYYYYYYYYYYY:role/dns-manager

    # this solver handles example.org challenges
    # and uses explicit credentials
    - selector:
        dnsZones:
          - "example.org"
      dns01:
        route53:
          region: eu-central-1
          accessKeyID: AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
          secretAccessKeySecretRef:
            name: prod-route53-credentials-secret
            key: secret-access-key
          # you can also assume a role with these credentials
          role: arn:aws:iam::YYYYYYYYYYYY:role/dns-manager

Note that, as mentioned above, the pod is using arn:aws:iam::XXXXXXXXXXX:role/cert-manager as a credentials source in Account X, but the ClusterIssuer ultimately assumes the arn:aws:iam::YYYYYYYYYYYY:role/dns-manager role to actually make changes in Route53 zones located in Account Y.

EKS IAM Role for Service Accounts (IRSA)

While kiam / kube2iam work directly with cert-manager, some special attention is needed for using the IAM Roles for Service Accounts feature available on EKS.

OIDC provider

First follow the AWS documentation Enabling IAM roles for service accounts on your cluster to ensure that the OIDC provider for the EKS cluster is enabled. The OIDC information is needed to create the trust relationship for the cert-manager role below.

IAM role trust policy

The cert-manager role needs the following trust relationship attached to the role in order to use the IRSA method. Replace the following:

<aws-account-id> with the AWS account ID of the EKS cluster.
<aws-region> with the region where the EKS cluster is located.
<eks-hash> with the hash in the EKS API URL; this will be a random 32 character hex string (example: 45DABD88EEE3A227AF0FA468BE4EF0B5)
<namespace> with the namespace where cert-manager is running.

<service-account-name> with the name of the ServiceAccount object created by cert-manager.

{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
  "Effect": "Allow",
  "Action": "sts:AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity",
  "Principal": {
    "Federated": "arn:aws:iam::<aws-account-id>:oidc-provider/oidc.eks.<aws-region>.amazonaws.com/id/<eks-hash>"
  },
  "Condition": {
    "StringEquals": {
      "oidc.eks.<aws-region>.amazonaws.com/id/<eks-hash>:sub": "system:serviceaccount:<namespace>:<service-account-name>"
    }
  }
}
]
}

Note: If you’re following the Cross Account example above, this trust policy is attached to the cert-manager role in Account X with ARN arn:aws:iam::XXXXXXXXXXX:role/cert-manager. The permissions policy is the same as above.

Service annotation

Annotate the ServiceAccount created by cert-manager:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  annotations:
    eks.amazonaws.com/role-arn: arn:aws:iam::XXXXXXXXXXX:role/cert-manager

The cert-manager Helm chart provides a variable for injecting annotations into cert-manager’s ServiceAccount object like so:

serviceAccount:
  annotations:
    eks.amazonaws.com/role-arn: arn:aws:iam::XXXXXXXXXXX:role/cert-manager

Note: If you’re following the Cross Account example above, modify the ClusterIssuer in the same way as above with the role from Account Y.

Last modified August 27, 2020: Update examples (4ef7e7f)