Permissions Management

If you need to assign different permissions to employees in your enterprise to access your ECS resources, IAM is a good choice for fine-grained permissions management. IAM provides identity authentication, permissions management, and access control, helping you secure access to your resources.

With IAM, you can use your account to create IAM users, and assign permissions to the users to control their access to specific resources. For example, some software developers in your enterprise need to use ECS resources but should not be allowed to delete the 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 permissions required for using ECS resources.

If your account does not need individual IAM users for permissions management, skip this section.

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

ECS 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 based on the permissions.

ECS is a project-level service deployed and accessed in specific physical regions. To assign ECS permissions to a user group, specify the scope as region-specific projects and select projects (such as ap-southeast-2 for the AP-Bangkok region) for the permissions to take effect. If you select All projects, the permissions will take effect for user groups in all region-specific projects. When accessing ECS, the users need to switch to a region where they have got permissions to use this service.

You can grant users permissions by using roles and policies.

Roles: A type of coarse-grained authorization mechanism that defines permissions related to user responsibilities. This mechanism provides only a limited number of service-level roles for authorization. When using roles to grant permissions, you also need to assign other roles which 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 strategy that defines permissions required to perform operations on specific cloud resources under certain conditions. This mechanism allows for more flexible policy-based authorization, meeting requirements for secure access control. For example, you can grant ECS users only the permissions for managing a certain type of ECSs.
Most policies define permissions based on APIs. For the API actions supported by ECS, see Permissions Policies and Supported Actions.

Table 1 and Table 2 list all ECS system-defined policies and roles.

**Table 1** ECS system-defined policies (recommended)
Policy/Role Name	Description	Policy Content
ECS FullAccess	Administrator permissions for ECS. Users granted these permissions can perform all operations on ECSs, including creating, deleting, and viewing ECSs, and modifying ECS specifications.	ECS FullAccess Policy Content
ECS CommonOperations	Common user permissions for ECS. Users granted these permissions can start, stop, restart, and query ECSs.	ECS CommonOperations Policy Content
ECS ReadOnlyAccess	Read-only permissions for ECS. Users granted these permissions can only view ECS data.	ECS ReadOnlyAccess Policy Content

**Table 2** ECS system-defined roles
Role Name	Description	Role Content
Server Administrator	Full permissions for ECS. This role must be used together with the Tenant Guest role in the same project. If a user needs to create, delete, or change resources of other services, the user must also be granted administrator permissions of the corresponding services in the same project. For example, if a user needs to create a new VPC when creating an ECS, the user must also be granted permissions with the VPC Administrator role.	Server Administrator Role Content

Table 3 lists the common operations supported by each system-defined policy of ECS. Select the policies as required.

**Table 3** Common operations supported by each system-defined policy
Operation	ECS FullAccess	ECS CommonOperations	ECS ReadOnlyAccess
Creating an ECS	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
Remotely logging in to an ECS on the management console	Supported	Supported	Not supported (VNC login not supported)
Querying an ECS list	Supported	Supported	Supported
Querying ECS details	Supported	Supported	Supported
Modifying ECS details	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
Starting an ECS	Supported	Supported	Not supported
Stopping an ECS	Supported	Supported	Not supported
Restarting an ECS	Supported	Supported	Not supported
Deleting an ECS	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
Reinstalling an ECS OS	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
Changing an ECS OS	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
Attaching a disk to an ECS	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
Detaching a disk from an ECS	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
Querying a disk list	Supported	Supported	Supported
Attaching a NIC to an ECS	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
Detaching a NIC from an ECS	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
Querying a NIC list	Supported	Supported	Supported
Adding tags to an ECS	Supported	Supported	Not supported
Modifying ECS specifications	Supported	Not supported	Not supported
Querying the ECS flavor list	Supported	Supported	Supported
Querying ECS groups	Supported	Supported	Supported

Role/Policy Dependencies of the ECS Console

**Table 4** Role/Policy dependencies of the ECS console
Console Function	Dependency	Role/Policy Required
ECS host security	Host Security Service (HSS)	To view host security information, an IAM user must be granted ECS FullAccess and HSS ReadOnlyAccess.
ECS console overview	Dedicated Host (DeH)	To view existing DeHs, an IAM user must be granted ECS FullAccess and DeH ReadOnlyAccess.
ECS purchase	Tag Management Service (TMS)	To view predefined tags, an IAM user must be granted ECS FullAccess and TMS ReadOnlyAccess.
ECS monitoring	Cloud Eye	To view ECS monitoring metrics, an IAM user must be granted ECS FullAccess and CES ReadOnlyAccess.

Helpful Links

IAM Service Overview
Creating a User and Granting ECS Permissions
Permissions Policies and Supported Actions in Elastic Cloud Server API Reference

ECS FullAccess Policy Content

{
        "Version": "1.1",
        "Statement": [
                {
                        "Effect": "Allow",
                        "Action": [
                                "ecs:*:*",
                                "evs:*:get",
                                "evs:*:list",
                                "evs:volumes:create",
                                "evs:volumes:delete",
                                "evs:volumes:attach",
                                "evs:volumes:detach",
                                "evs:volumes:manage",
                                "evs:volumes:update",
                                "evs:volumes:use",
                                "evs:volumes:uploadImage",
                                "evs:snapshots:create",
                                "vpc:*:get",
                                "vpc:*:list",
                                "vpc:networks:create",
                                "vpc:networks:update",
                                "vpc:subnets:update",
                                "vpc:subnets:create",
                                "vpc:ports:*",
                                "vpc:routers:get",
                                "vpc:routers:update",
                                "vpc:securityGroups:*",
                                "vpc:securityGroupRules:*",
                                "vpc:floatingIps:*",
                                "vpc:publicIps:*",
                                "ims:images:create",
                                "ims:images:delete",
                                "ims:images:get",
                                "ims:images:list",
                                "ims:images:update",
                                "ims:images:upload"
                        ]
                }
        ]
}

ECS CommonOperations Policy Content

{
        "Version": "1.1",
        "Statement": [
                {
                        "Effect": "Allow",
                        "Action": [
                                "ecs:*:get*",
                                "ecs:*:list*",
                                "ecs:*:start",
                                "ecs:*:stop",
                                "ecs:*:reboot",
                                "ecs:blockDevice:use",
                                "ecs:cloudServerFpgaImages:relate",
                                "ecs:cloudServerFpgaImages:register",
                                "ecs:cloudServerFpgaImages:delete",
                                "ecs:cloudServerFpgaImags:unrelate",
                                "ecs:cloudServers:setAutoRecovery",
                                "ecs:cloudServerPasswords:reset",
                                "ecs:cloudServerPorts:modify",
                                "ecs:cloudServers:vnc",
                                "ecs:diskConfigs:use",
                                "ecs:securityGroups:use",
                                "ecs:serverGroups:manage",
                                "ecs:serverFloatingIps:use",
                                "ecs:serverKeypairs:*",
                                "ecs:serverPasswords:manage",
                                "ecs:servers:createConsole",
                                "ecs:servers:createImage",
                                "ecs:servers:setMetadata",
                                "ecs:servers:setTags",
                                "ecs:serverVolumes:use",
                                "evs:*:get*",
                                "evs:*:list*",
                                "evs:snapshots:create",
                                "evs:volumes:uploadImage",
                                "evs:volumes:delete",
                                "evs:volumes:update",
                                "evs:volumes:attach",
                                "evs:volumes:detach",
                                "evs:volumes:manage",
                                "evs:volumes:use",
                                "vpc:*:get*",
                                "vpc:*:list*",
                                "vpc:floatingIps:create",
                                "vpc:floatingIps:update",
                                "vpc:floatingIps:delete",
                                "vpc:publicIps:update",
                                "vpc:publicIps:delete",
                                "ims:images:create",
                                "ims:images:delete",
                                "ims:images:get",
                                "ims:images:list",
                                "ims:images:update",
                                "ims:images:upload"
                        ]
                }
        ]
}

ECS ReadOnlyAccess Policy Content

{
        "Version": "1.1",
        "Statement": [
                {
                        "Effect": "Allow",
                        "Action": [
                                "ecs:*:get*",
                                "ecs:*:list*",
                                "ecs:serverGroups:manage",
                                "ecs:serverVolumes:use",
                                "evs:*:get*",
                                "evs:*:list*",
                                "vpc:*:get*",
                                "vpc:*:list*",
                                "ims:*:get*",
                                "ims:*:list*"
                        ]
                }
        ]
}

Server Administrator Role Content

{
    "Version": "1.1",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Action": [
                "ecs:*:*",
                "evs:*:get",
                "evs:*:list",
                "evs:volumes:create",
                "evs:volumes:delete",
                "evs:volumes:attach",
                "evs:volumes:detach",
                "evs:volumes:manage",
                "evs:volumes:update",
                "evs:volumes:uploadImage",
                "evs:snapshots:create",
                "vpc:*:get",
                "vpc:*:list",
                "vpc:networks:create",
                "vpc:networks:update",
                "vpc:subnets:update",
                "vpc:subnets:create",
                "vpc:routers:get",
                "vpc:routers:update",
                "vpc:ports:*",
                "vpc:privateIps:*",
                "vpc:securityGroups:*",
                "vpc:securityGroupRules:*",
                "vpc:floatingIps:*",
                "vpc:publicIps:*",
                "vpc:bandwidths:*",
                "vpc:firewalls:*",
                "ims:images:create",
                "ims:images:delete",
                "ims:images:get",
                "ims:images:list",
                "ims:images:update",
                "ims:images:upload"
            ],
            "Effect": "Allow"
        }
    ]
}

Previous topic: ECS and Other Services

Next topic: Region and AZ