[Tutorials-Dojo]

The primary use case of an IAM Role is to grant access/permissions to your AWS resources. You can also access your AWS Resources through the AWS API, which uses IAM User credentials for authentication.

As a rule of thumb, you can directly attach an IAM Role to your EC2 Instances.

For on-premises servers, you cannot directly attach an IAM Role but you can associate an IAM Role to the CodeDeploy agent that’s installed on your on-premises servers or through the <b style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>register-on-premises-instance command.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codedeploy/latest/userguide/register-on-premises-instance-iam-session-arn.html

So going back to your original question –– yes, you can definitely associate an IAM Role to your on-premises servers

Cheers,

Jon Bonso

[Tutorials-Dojo]

You can see the term “attach an IAM Role” in the actual AWS Management Console (see attached) as well as in the official AWS Documentation:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/iam-roles-for-amazon-ec2.html

Conversely, the term “Associate” is used if you want to add an Elastic IP address to your Amazon EC2 instances, or to other use cases.