title: AWS Elastic Beanstalk Environment Requesting associated "instance profile"
body: <p>When using the web UI for AWS Elastic Beanstalk Environment management, I see:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Code change deployments will complete faster if you associate an
    instance profile with this environment.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>(also see this forum post mentioning the same thing: <a href="http://www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/staff/leitner/cs_study/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=186#p186" rel="nofollow">http://www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/staff/leitner/cs_study/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=186#p186</a>)</p>
  
  <p>What is an instance profile? Why does it matter? How does it work / what is it doing?</p>
  
  <p>I found these articles:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="http://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/instance-profiles.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/instance-profiles.html</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/iam/create-instance-profile.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/iam/create-instance-profile.html</a></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>but I still don't understand instance profiles.</p>