Permissions Policies and Supported Actions

This chapter describes how to use IAM to implement fine-grained permissions control for your Config resources. If your account does not need individual IAM users, skip this chapter.

A policy is a set of permissions defined in JSON format. By default, new IAM users do not have permissions assigned. You need to add a user to one or more groups, and attach permissions policies or roles to these groups. Users inherit permissions from the groups to which they are added and can perform specified operations on cloud services based on the permissions.

Based on authorization granularity, permissions are classified into roles and policies.

• Roles are a type of service-based, coarse-grained authorization mechanism that defines permissions related to user 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 the permissions required to call all APIs, but IAM users must be assigned the required permissions. The permissions required for calling an API are determined by the actions supported by the API. Only users who have been granted permissions allowing the actions can call the API successfully.