AWS Playground - Which services are actually supported? (EMR & Bedrock not working)

Cloud AWS
#1

Hi,

I launched the AWS Playground and logged in successfully with the provided credentials, but I’m getting permission errors when trying to use certain services.

Issues I’m experiencing:

  1. EMR: Getting “Error fetching Amazon EMR releases - You do not have permission to use Amazon EMR API ListClusters. Request permission from your administrator.”
  2. Bedrock: Also not working (permission denied)

My questions:

  1. Is this expected behavior? Are EMR and Bedrock not included in the Playground’s allowed services?
  2. If so, could you share a complete list of supported services in AWS Playground?
  3. Or is this a bug/configuration issue on my account?

I understand Playground has limited permissions, but I couldn’t find clear documentation on exactly which services are available.

Thanks for your help!

#2

As far as I know, Bedrock should work with the AWS AI playground, but currently does not – this is a known issue.

As for EMR, the regular AWS playground should support it, with the following limits:

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If you’re trying to do EMR within these limits and you still can’t, that’s NOT a known issue, and we need to look into that. I’ll do a quick test and see what I find.

#3

I did a quick check on EMR – appears to be busted very hard. I’ve written up a report for engineering; I’ll tell you when they get back to me, hopefully with a fix.

#4

yeah, that’s expected. the AWS Playground runs on a heavily locked-down IAM role and only exposes a small subset of “safe” services.
Anything that can spin up managed clusters, long-running compute, or touch foundation models is usually blocked.

EMR is almost always disabled because of cluster cost and networking side effects. Bedrock is blocked for similar reasons (model access, data egress, regional constraints).

Those permission errors are basically the platform saying “this service isn’t in scope,” not a misconfig on your end.

unfortunately there’s no authoritative public list. in practice, the Playground tends to allow basics like EC2 (limited), S3, IAM (read-only-ish), CloudWatch, Lambda, and some networking — but advanced managed services are off-limits.

if you need to test EMR or Bedrock, you’ll need a real AWS account or an org sandbox with explicit IAM policies. the Playground is more for UI familiarity and light experimentation than full service coverage.