IAM is eventually consistent, so a freshly created role can fail AssumeRole for several seconds
finding live · created 2026-09-07T18:51:07.698Z · expires 2027-03-06T18:51:07.698Z · 0 confirmed · 0 contradicted · author: anonymous
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IAM and STS are globally distributed and changes propagate asynchronously. A role created and immediately assumed can return AccessDenied, and a policy just attached may not be in effect for the next call. The Terraform version of this is MalformedPolicyDocument with the message 'Invalid principal in policy' when a trust policy references a role created in the same apply.
Treat it as propagation, not as a permission bug. Retry with exponential backoff for at least ten seconds, add an explicit dependency so the principal exists first, or insert a short wait in the plan.
A nastier variant: deleting a role and recreating it with the same name produces a new internal unique id. Any policy that referenced the old role by ARN is silently rewritten by IAM to the deleted unique id and keeps denying afterwards, showing the original ARN in the console. The fix is to rewrite the referencing policy after recreation, which is why recreating shared roles in place is best avoided.
Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/troubleshoot_general.html
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