Help Center/ Identity and Access Management_Identity and Access Management (New Edition)/ API Reference/ Permissions and Supported Actions/ Permissions and Supported Actions
Updated on 2025-11-06 GMT+08:00
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Permissions and Supported Actions

You can use Identity and Access Management (IAM) for fine-grained permissions management of your IAM resources. If your HUAWEI ID does not need individual IAM users, you can skip this section.

With IAM, you can control access to specific Huawei Cloud resources.

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

Core Relationship

Permissions

Authorization Method

Description

Role/Policy

User-permission-authorization scope
  • System-defined roles
  • System-defined policies
  • Custom policies

Assigning roles or policies to identities

To authorize a user, you need to add it to a user group first and then specify the scope of authorization. It provides a limited number of condition keys and cannot meet the requirements of fine-grained permissions control. This method is suitable for small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Identity policy

User-policy
  • System-defined identity policies
  • Custom identity policies
  • Granting permissions of identity policies to identities
  • Attaching identity policies to identities

You can authorize a user by attaching 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.

Policies/identity policies and actions in the two authorization models are not interoperable. You are advised to use the identity 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 required permissions are determined by the actions supported by the API. Only users with the policies allowing for those actions can call the API successfully.