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Introduction

This chapter describes fine-grained permissions management for your GaussDB NoSQL. If your account does not need individual IAM users, then you may skip over this chapter.

By default, new IAM users do not have any permissions granted. You need to add a user to one or more groups, and assign policies or roles to these groups. The user then inherits permissions from the groups it is a member of. This process is called authorization. After authorization, the user can perform specified operations on the service based on the permissions.

You can grant users permissions by using roles and policies. Roles: A coarse-grained authorization mechanism provided by IAM to define permissions based on users' job responsibilities. Policies define API-based permissions for operations on specific resources under certain conditions, allowing for more fine-grained, secure access control of cloud resources.

Policy-based authorization is useful if you want to allow or deny the access to an API.

An account has all of the permissions required to call all APIs, but IAM users must have the required permissions specifically assigned. The permissions required for calling an API are determined by the actions supported by the API. Only users that have been granted permissions allowing the actions can call the API successfully. For example, if an IAM user queries GaussDB(for Cassandra) instances using an API, the user must have been granted permissions that allow the nosql:instance:list action.

Supported Actions

GaussDB NoSQL provides system-defined policies that can be directly used in IAM. You can also create custom policies and use them to supplement system-defined policies, implementing more refined access control. Actions supported by policies are specific to APIs. The following are common concepts related to policies:

  • Permission: A statement in a policy that allows or denies certain operations.
  • APIs: REST APIs that can be called in a custom policy.
  • Actions: Added to a custom policy to control permissions for specific operations.
  • IAM projects or enterprise projects: Type of projects in which policies can be used to grant permissions. A policy can be applied to IAM projects, enterprise projects, or both. Policies that contain actions supporting both IAM and enterprise projects can be assigned to user groups and take effect in both IAM and Enterprise Management. Policies that only contain actions supporting IAM projects can be assigned to user groups and only take effect for IAM. Such policies will not take effect if they are assigned to user groups in Enterprise Management. For details about the differences between IAM and enterprise projects, see Differences Between IAM Projects and Enterprise Projects.

For details about the custom actions supported by GaussDB NoSQL, see Actions.