CloudWatch Agent fails to authenticate: IMDS Issues

[kwangjong]

same issue as this: aws/amazon-cloudwatch-agent#1101

I solved it by modifying /cloudwatch-agent-daemonset.yaml like this:

apiVersion: cloudwatch.aws.amazon.com/v1alpha1
kind: AmazonCloudWatchAgent
metadata:
  name: {{ template "cloudwatch-agent.name" . }}
  namespace: {{ .Release.Namespace }}
spec:
+ hostNetwork: true
  image: {{ template "cloudwatch-agent.image" . }}
  mode: daemonset
  ...
  env:
+ - name: RUN_WITH_IRSA
+   value: "True"
  - name: K8S_NODE_NAME
    valueFrom:
      fieldRef:
        fieldPath: spec.nodeName
  ...

And, configured Gatekeeper to restrict the hostnetwork access exclusive to cloudwatch agent.
As this doc recommends to block IMDS access from unwanted pods:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/security-practices-multi-tenant-saas-applications-eks/restrict-the-use-of-host-networking-and-block-access-to-instance-metadata-service.html

But, there needs to be more robust and permanent solution to address this issue.

[lisguo]

Hello, we are aware of the issue. We are evaluating a solution where we run the cloudwatch agent pod with hostNetwork: true to resolve the hop limit restriction.

Just to clarify, you need both hostNetwork: true AND RUN_WITH_IRSA set to true as an environment variable?

[kwangjong]

yes. without setting RUN_WITH_IRSA to True, the pod attempted to authenticate using /root/.aws/credentials in my case.

[lisguo]

Can you clarify what your cluster setup looks like? Are you using EKS? Native K8s on EC2?

[dbcelm]

Using EKS 1.29 with BottleRocketOS AMI nodes [IMDSv2 with hop-limit:2] and facing credentials not found issue within cloudwatch-agents pods, fluentbit works fine though after annotating "cloudwatch-agent" SA with IRSA that both fluentbit and cloudwatch-agent daemonsets share.

Adding env values mentioned by @kwangjong made permissions work. Also as of now there is no way to add annotations to "cloudwatch-agent" SA from helm values file, can that be added?

Also "hostnetwork" parameter will be required for custom CNI use cases. In my case, I am using CiliumCNI and hence "hostNetwork: true" was required for agent to work

[kwangjong]

Can you clarify what your cluster setup looks like? Are you using EKS? Native K8s on EC2?

I am using EKS 1.3

[jamesking-github]

I am using EKS 1.30 and seeing this issue also.

[mtavaresmedeiros]

Any update on it? @lisguo
@dbcelm, how did you pass the annotations to the service account?