Help Center> GaussDB> API Reference> Permissions Policies and Supported Actions> Introduction
Updated on 2024-07-12 GMT+08:00
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Introduction

This chapter describes how to use Identity and Access Management (IAM) to implement fine-grained permissions management for your GaussDB. If your Huawei Cloud account does not need individual IAM users, then you may skip over this chapter.

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.

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 GaussDB instances using an API, the user must have been granted permissions that allow the GaussDB:instance:list action.

Supported Actions

System-defined policies 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:

  • Permissions: Statements in a policy that allow or deny certain operations.
  • APIs: APIs that will be called for performing certain operations.
  • Actions: Added to a custom policy to control permissions for specific operations.
  • Related actions: Actions which a specific action depends on to take effect. When assigning permissions for the action to a user, you also need to assign permissions for the dependent actions.
  • 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.

    The check mark (√) and cross symbol (x) indicate that an action takes effect or does not take effect for the corresponding type of projects.