Patent ID: 8683560

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for providing remote computing services, comprising: under the control of one or more computer systems configured with executable instructions, in connection with a request from a customer of a remote computing services provider, receiving, from the customer, information stating, for the set of virtual machine instances of the customer, at least: a policy specifying privileges for a set of virtual machine instances; and granularity information specifying a manner for distributing credentials among subsets of the set of virtual machine instances; in response to the request: creating the set of virtual machine instances; associating each subset of the subsets with different corresponding credentials; assigning each subset as a principal of the policy; and distributing, to each subset, associated corresponding credentials such that access to the distributed associated corresponding credentials by the created set of virtual machine instances is limited to the subset; and for each subset of the subsets, making, without authentication, associated corresponding credentials available to one or more processes executing in one or more virtual machine instances of the subset for use in one or more authentication processes for accessing one or more computing resources allowed by the policy.