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Accessing S3 data securely

This article demonstrates how ClickHouse Cloud customers can leverage role-based access to authenticate with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and access their data securely. Before diving into the setup for secure S3 access, it is important to understand how this works. Below is an overview of how ClickHouse services can access private S3 buckets by assuming into a role within customers' AWS account.



This approach allows customers to manage all access to their S3 buckets in a single place (the IAM policy of the assumed-role) without having to go through all of their bucket policies to add or remove access. In the section below, you will learn how to set this up.

Obtain the IAM role ARN of your ClickHouse service​

  1. Login to your ClickHouse cloud account.

  2. Select the ClickHouse service you want to create the integration

  3. Select the Settings tab

  4. Scroll down to the Network security information section at the bottom of the page

  5. Copy the Service role ID (IAM) value belong to the service as shown below.

Set up IAM assume role​

The IAM assume role can be setup in one of two ways:

Deploying with CloudFormation stack​

  1. Login to your AWS Account in the web browser with an IAM user that has permission to create & manage IAM role.

  2. Visit the following CloudFormation URL to populate the CloudFormation stack.

  3. Enter (or paste) the service role ID (IAM) for your service that you obtained earlier into the input titled "ClickHouse Instance Roles" You can paste the service role ID exactly as it appears in Cloud console.

  4. Enter your bucket name in the input titled "Bucket Names". If your bucket URL is https://ch-docs-s3-bucket.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/clickhouseS3/ then the bucket name is ch-docs-s3-bucket.

Note

Do not put the full bucket ARN but instead just the bucket name only.

  1. Configure the CloudFormation stack. Below is additional information about these parameters.
ParameterDefault ValueDescription
RoleNameClickHouseAccess-001The name of the new role that ClickHouse Cloud will use to access your S3 bucket
Role Session Name*Role Session Name can be used as a shared secret to further protect your bucket.
ClickHouse Instance RolesComma separated list of ClickHouse service IAM roles that can use this Secure S3 integration.
Bucket AccessReadSets the level of access for the provided buckets.
Bucket NamesComma separated list of bucket names that this role will have access to.

  1. Select the I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names. checkbox

  2. Click the Create stack button at the bottom right

  3. Make sure the CloudFormation stack completes with no error.

  4. Select the newly created Stack then select the Outputs tab of the CloudFormation stack

  5. Copy the RoleArn value for this integration, which is what you need to access your S3 bucket.

Manually create IAM role​

  1. Login to your AWS Account in the web browser with an IAM user that has permission to create & manage IAM role.

  2. Browse to the IAM Service Console

  3. Create a new IAM role with the following IAM & Trust policy

Trust policy (Please replace {ClickHouse_IAM_ARN} with the IAM Role arn belong to your ClickHouse instance):

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": {
                "AWS": "{ClickHouse_IAM_ARN}"
            },
            "Action": "sts:AssumeRole"
        }
    ]
}

IAM policy (Please replace {BUCKET_NAME} with your bucket name):

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Action": [
                "s3:GetBucketLocation",
                "s3:ListBucket"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::{BUCKET_NAME}"
            ],
            "Effect": "Allow"
        },
        {
            "Action": [
                "s3:Get*",
                "s3:List*"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::{BUCKET_NAME}/*"
            ],
            "Effect": "Allow"
        }
    ]
}
  1. Copy the new IAM Role Arn after creation, which is what is needed to access your S3 bucket.

Access your S3 bucket with the ClickHouseAccess role​

ClickHouse Cloud allows you to specify extra_credentials as part of the S3 table function. Below is an example of how to run a query using the newly created role copied from above.

DESCRIBE TABLE s3('https://s3.amazonaws.com/BUCKETNAME/BUCKETOBJECT.csv','CSVWithNames',extra_credentials(role_arn = 'arn:aws:iam::111111111111:role/ClickHouseAccessRole-001'))

Below is an example query that uses the role_session_name as a shared secret to query data from a bucket. If the role_session_name is not correct, this operation will fail.

DESCRIBE TABLE s3('https://s3.amazonaws.com/BUCKETNAME/BUCKETOBJECT.csv','CSVWithNames',extra_credentials(role_arn = 'arn:aws:iam::111111111111:role/ClickHouseAccessRole-001', role_session_name = 'secret-role-name'))
Note

We recommend that your source S3 is in the same region as your ClickHouse Cloud Service to reduce on data transfer costs. For more information, refer to S3 pricing