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Updated on 2026-06-22 GMT+08:00
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Description of Permissions and Supported Actions

This section describes fine-grained permissions management for your DWS service using Identity and Access Management (IAM). You can skip this section if your Huawei Cloud account already satisfies your needs.

With IAM, you can control access to specific Huawei Cloud resources by granting permissions to principals (IAM users, user groups, agencies, or trust agencies). IAM supports role/policy-based authorization and identity policy-based authorization.

The following table describes the differences between these two authorization models.

Table 1 Differences between role/policy-based and identity policy-based authorization

Authorization Model

Authorization Using

Permission

Authorization Method

Application Scenarios

Role/Policy

User-permissions-authorization scope
  • System-defined roles
  • System policy
  • Custom policies

Granting a role or policy to a subject

To authorize a user, add it to a user group and specify the scope of authorization. It is hard to provide fine-grained permissions control using authorization granted by user groups and a limited number of condition keys. This method is suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Identity policy

User-Policy
  • System policy
  • Custom identity policy
  • Assigning identity policies to principals
  • Attaching identity policies to principals

To authorize a user, grant an identity policy to it. User-specific authorization and a variety of key conditions allow for more fine-grained permissions control. However, this model can be hard to set up. It requires a certain amount of expertise and is suitable for medium- and large-sized enterprises.

Assume that you want to grant IAM users permission to create ECSs in CN North-Beijing4 and OBS buckets in CN South-Guangzhou. With role/policy-based authorization, the administrator needs to create two custom policies and attach both to the IAM users. With identity policy-based authorization, the administrator only needs to create one custom policy, configure the condition key g:RequestedRegion for the policy, and then attach the policy to the users or grant the users the access permissions to the specified regions. Identity policy-based authorization is more flexible than role/policy-based authorization.

Policies/Identity policies and actions in the two authorization models are not interoperable. You are advised to use the role/policy-based authorization model.

If you use IAM users in your account to call an API, the IAM users must be granted 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.

Parent Topic: Permissions and Supported Actions