Introduction

This section describes fine-grained permissions management for LakeFormation. If your account does not need individual IAM users, then you may skip this section.

New IAM users do not have any permissions assigned by default. You need to first add them to one or more groups and attach policies or roles to these groups. Users inherit permissions from their groups and can perform operations on cloud services as allowed by the permissions.

You can grant permissions by using roles and policies. Roles are provided by IAM to define service-based permissions that match users' job responsibilities. Policies are more fine-grained, API-based permissions required to perform operations on specific cloud resources under certain conditions, meeting requirements for secure access control.

Policy-based authorization is useful if you want to allow or deny the access to an API.

Each account has all the permissions required to call all APIs, but IAM users must be assigned 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. For example, if an IAM user wants to query ECSs using an API, the user must have been granted permissions that allow the ecs:servers:list action.