ec2: permission denied when trying to start instance with knife

Question

I am working on getting knife to bring up ec2 instances:

• I copied the policy from [What permissions in IAM do i need to start EC2 instances with chef knife?
• I 'attached' the policy to a minimal user, group and role I created in IAM

• I tried this command and variants:

  knife ec2 server create --image ami-5189a661 --flavor t2.micro -x root -i test4hmh.pem -S test4hmh.pem --user markmc4hmh

I always get:

ERROR: Fog::Compute::AWS::Error: UnauthorizedOperation => You are not authorized to perform this operation.

What am I missing? Please advise. Thanks.

Answer 1

I also had issues with the upvoted answer, if you check the cloudtrail logs you can see why the operation failed.

For me it needed ec2:DescribeAddress and iam:PassRole for the role I was attaching.