IAM policies: What's the Version 2012-10-17?

AWS IAM 2012-10-17

1 min read | by Jordi Prats

While creating IAM policies you might have wondered: what's 2012-10-17? Is it something we need to update?

Checking the AWS documentation on IAM polcies, we can see that, currently, it supports two versions:

  • 2012-10-17: The latest version available
  • 2008-10-17: The previous version of the policy language, which is still the default

If you don't explicitly specify 2012-10-17 there are a bunch of features that you won't be able to use, such as policy variables: For example, variables such as ${aws:username} won't be recognized as variables and are treated as literal strings instead.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
(...)

Thus, the Version it's not something we need to explicitly set to 2012-10-17 if we want to use the latest version even thought it looks like it's been a long time, it's not the default yet

Posted on 08/02/2021

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