Permissions Management

If you need to grant different permissions to employees in your enterprise to access your IMS resources, IAM is a good choice for fine-grained permissions management. IAM provides identity authentication, permissions management, and access control, helping you secure access to your HUAWEI CLOUD resources.

With IAM, you can use your HUAWEI CLOUD account to create IAM users for your employees, and grant permissions to the users to control their access to specific resource types. For example, some software developers in your enterprise need to use IMS resources but must not delete them or perform any high-risk operations. To achieve this result, you can create IAM users for the software developers and grant them only the permissions required for using IMS resources.

If your HUAWEI CLOUD account does not require individual IAM users for permissions management, skip this section.

IAM can be used free of charge. You pay only for the resources in your account. For more information about IAM, see IAM Service Overview.

IMS Permissions

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 BMS based on the permissions.

IMS is a project-level service deployed and accessed in specific physical regions. To grant IMS permissions to a user group, specify the scope as region-specific projects and select projects for the permissions to take effect. If All projects is selected, the permissions will take effect for the user group in all region-specific projects. When accessing IMS, users need to switch to a region where they have been authorized to use IMS.

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. This mechanism provides only a limited number of service-level roles for authorization. When using roles to grant permissions, you also need to assign other roles that the permissions depend on to take effect. However, roles are not an ideal choice for fine-grained authorization and secure access control.
  • Policies: A type of fine-grained authorization mechanism that defines permissions required to perform operations on specific cloud resources under certain conditions. This mechanism allows for more flexible policy-based authorization, meeting requirements for secure access control. For example, you can grant IMS users only the permissions for managing a certain type of image resources. Most policies define permissions based on APIs. For the API actions supported by IMS, see Permissions Policies and Supported Actions.
Table 1 lists all the system-defined permissions supported by IMS.
Table 1 System-defined permissions supported by IMS

Role/Policy Name

Description

Type

Dependency

IMS FullAccess

All permissions of IMS

System-defined policy

None

IMS ReadOnlyAccess

Read-only permissions for IMS. Users granted these permissions can only view IMS data.

System-defined policy

None

IMS Administrator

Administrator permissions for IMS

System-defined role

This role depends on the Tenant Administrator role.

Server Administrator

Permissions for creating, deleting, querying, modifying, and uploading images

System-defined role

This role depends on the IMS Administrator role in the same project.

Table 2 lists the common operations supported by each system-defined permission of IMS. Select the permissions as needed.

Table 2 Common operations supported by each system-defined permission

Operation

IMS FullAccess

IMS ReadOnlyAccess

IMS Administrator

Creating an image

x

Deleting an image

x

Querying an image

Updating image information

x