What is a good way to access external data from aws

Question

I would like to access external data from my aws ec2 instance.

In more detail: I would like to specify inside by user-data the name of a folder containing about 2M of binary data. When my aws instance starts up, I would like it to download the files in that folder and copy them to a specific location on the local disk. I only need to access the data once, at startup.

I don't want to store the data in S3 because, as I understand it, this would require storing my aws credentials on the instance itself, or passing them as userdata which is also a security risk. Please correct me if I am wrong here.

I am looking for a solution that is both secure and highly reliable.

Answer 1

which operating system do you run ?

you can use an elastic block storage. it's like a device you can mount at boot (without credentials) and you have permanent storage there.