Smartstore with S3 - how to authenticate AWS EKS v1.24+ with Splunk 9.0.* and Smartstore ?

[aroth]

Hi,

we have been running indexer pods with Smartstore on S3 for a while without problems. When upgrading to AWS EKS v1.24+ the pods can't read EC2 instance metadata anymore and thus S3 authentication fails.

Is anyone running this successfully?

 AWS EKS v1.24+   -- Splunk 8.2.* / 9.0.* -- Splunk Operator 1.1.0 / 2.2.1

Documentation at https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/9.0.5/admin/Indexesconf states:

remote.s3.access_key = <string>
* Specifies the access key to use when authenticating with the remote storage
  system supporting the S3 API.
* If not specified, the indexer will look for these environment variables:
  AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID or AWS_ACCESS_KEY (in that order).
* If the environment variables are not set and the indexer is running on EC2,
  the indexer attempts to use the access key from the IAM role.
* Optional.
* No default.

 Is anyone running this by IAM Role and without setting AWS access and secret keys in indexes.conf? 

Thankful for any hints,

Arndt