Permissions

If you need to assign different permissions to employees in your enterprise to access your Direct Connect resources, Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a good choice for fine-grained permissions management. IAM provides identity authentication, permissions management, and access control, helping you securely manage access to your Huawei Cloud resources.

With IAM, you can use your account to create IAM users for your employees, and assign permissions to the users to control their access to specific resource types. For example, some software developers in your enterprise need to use Direct Connect but should not be allowed to delete other Direct Connect resources or perform any other high-risk operations. In this scenario, you can create IAM users for the software developers and grant them only the required permissions.

Skip this part if your account does not require individual IAM users for permissions management.

IAM is a free service. You pay only for the resources in your account. For more information about IAM, see the What Is IAM?.

Direct Connect Permissions

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.

Direct Connect is a project-level service deployed and accessed in specific physical regions. To assign permissions to a user group, specify the scope as region-specific projects and select projects for the permissions to take effect. If All projects is selected, the permissions will take effect for the user group in all region-specific projects. When accessing Direct Connect, the users need to switch to a region where they have been authorized to use this service.

You can grant permissions by using roles or policies.

Roles: A type of coarse-grained authorization mechanism that defines permissions related to user responsibilities. Only a limited number of service-level roles for authorization are available. When using roles to grant permissions, you need to also assign other roles that the permissions depend on to take effect. However, roles are not an ideal choice for fine-grained authorization and secure access control.
Policies: A fine-grained authorization mechanism that defines permissions required to perform operations on specific cloud resources under certain conditions. This mechanism allows for more flexible policy-based authorization, and meets the requirements for secure access control. For example, you can grant Direct Connect users the permissions for only managing a certain type of Direct Connect resources.

Table 1 lists all system-defined roles or policies supported by Direct Connect.

**Table 1** Direct Connect roles or policies
Role/Policy Name	Description	Type	Dependency
Direct Connect Administrator	Has all permissions for Direct Connect resources. To have these permissions, users must also have the Tenant Guest and VPC Administrator permissions.	System-defined role	Tenant Guest and VPC Administrator VPC Administrator: project-level policy, which must be assigned in the same project Tenant Guest: project-level policy, which must be assigned in the same project
DCaaS Partner	Has permissions of Direct Connect partners. Users who have these permissions can create hosted operations for others. To have these permissions, users must also have the Tenant Guest and VPC Administrator permissions.	System-defined role	Tenant Guest and VPC Administrator VPC Administrator: project-level policy, which must be assigned in the same project Tenant Guest: project-level policy, which must be assigned in the same project
DCAAS FullAccess	Permissions: all permissions for Direct Connect Scope: project-level service	System-defined policy	None
DCAAS ReadOnlyAccess	Permissions: read-only permissions for Direct Connect Scope: project-level service	System-defined policy	None

Table 2 lists common operations supported by each system-defined role or policy for Direct Connect.

**Table 2** Common operations supported by each system-defined role or policy
Operation	Direct Connect Administrator	DCaaS Partner	DCAAS FullAccess	DCAAS ReadOnlyAccess
Creating a connection	√	√	√	×
Viewing a connection	√	√	√	√
Modifying a connection	√	√	√	×
Deleting a connection	√	√	√	×
Creating a virtual gateway	√	√	√	×
Viewing a virtual gateway	√	√	√	√
Modifying a virtual gateway	√	√	√	×
Deleting a virtual gateway	√	√	√	×
Creating a virtual interface	√	√	√	×
Viewing a virtual interface	√	√	√	√
Modifying a virtual interface	√	√	√	×
Deleting a virtual interface	√	√	√	×
Creating an operations connection	√	√	√	×
Viewing an operations connection	√	√	√	√
Modifying an operations connection	√	√	√	×
Deleting an operations connection	√	√	√	×
Creating a hosted connection	√	√	√	×
Viewing a hosted connection	√	√	√	√
Modifying a hosted connection	√	√	√	×
Deleting a hosted connection	√	√	√	×