Introduction

You can use Identity and Access Management (IAM) for fine-grained management of the permissions for your GeminiDB databases. If your account does not need individual IAM users, then you may skip over this section.

By default, new IAM users do not have permissions assigned. You need to add a user to one or more groups, and attach permission policies or roles to these groups. Users inherit permissions from the groups that they are added to and can perform specified operations on cloud services based on the permissions.

You can grant users permissions by using roles and policies. Roles are a type of 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. For example, if an IAM user queries GeminiDB Cassandra instances using an API, the user must have been granted the permissions that allow the nosql:instance:list action.