How long should I wait after applying an AWS IAM policy before it is valid?

Question

I\'m adding and removing AWS IAM user policies programmatically, and I\'m getting inconsistent results from the application of those policies.

For example, this may

Answer 1

I have a far less scientific answer here... but I think it will help some other people feel less insane :). I kept thinking things were not working while they were just taking more time than I expected.

Last night I was adding an inline policy to allow a host to get parameters from the system manager. I thought it wasn't working because many minutes after the change (maybe 5 or so), my CLI commands were still failing. Then, they started working. So, that was a fairly large delay.

Just now, I removed that policy and it took 2-3 minutes (enough to google this and read a couple other pages) before my host lost access.

Generally things are quite snappy for me as well, but if you're pretty sure something should work and it's not, just do yourself a favor and wait 10 minutes. Unfortunately, this makes automation after IAM changes sound harder than I thought!