Permissions

If you need to assign different permissions to personnel in your enterprise to access your ELB 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 access your cloud resources. If your Huawei Cloud account does not require IAM for permissions management, you can skip this section.

IAM is a free service. You only pay for the resources in your account.

With IAM, you can control access to specific cloud resources. For example, if you want some software developers in your enterprise to use ELB resources but do not want them to delete these resources or perform any other high-risk operations, you can grant permission to use ELB resources but not permission to delete them.

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	Authorization Using	Permissions	Authorization Method	Scenario
Role/Policy	User-permission-authorization scope	System-defined roles System-defined policies Custom policies	Granting roles or policies to principals	To authorize a user, you need to add it to a user group first and then specify the scope of authorization. It is hard to provide fine-grained permissions control using authorization by user groups and a limited number of condition keys. This method is suitable for small- and medium-sized enterprises.
Identity policy	Policies	System-defined identity policies Custom policies	Assigning identity policies to principals Attaching identity policies to principals	You can authorize a user by directly attaching an identity policy to it. You can customize policies and attach them to specified users. Identity policies allow you to perform refined access control more efficiently and flexibly. However, this model is more complex and requires higher personnel expertise. It is more suitable for medium- and large-sized enterprises.

Assume that you want to grant IAM users the permissions needed to create ECSs in CN North-Beijing4 and OBS buckets in CN South-Guangzhou. With role/policy-based authorization, the administrator needs to create two custom policies and assign both to the IAM users. With identity policy-based authorization, the administrator only needs to create one custom identity policy and configure the condition key g:RequestedRegion for the policy, and then attach the policy to the principals or grant the principals the access permissions to the specified regions. Identity policy-based authorization is more flexible than role/policy-based authorization.

The two authorization models require independent policies and permissions. You are advised to use identity policies for authorization. For details about system-defined permissions, see Role/Policy-based Authorization and Identity Policy-based Authorization.

For more information about IAM, see IAM Service Overview.

Role/Policy-based Authorization

ELB supports authorization with roles and policies. 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. The users then inherit permissions from the groups and can perform specified operations on cloud services based on the permissions they have been assigned.

ELB is a project-level service deployed for specific regions. When you set Scope to Region-specific projects and select the specified projects (for example, ap-southeast-2) in the specified regions (for example, AP-Bangkok), the users only have permissions for load balancers in the selected projects. If you set Scope to All resources, the users have permissions for load balancers in all region-specific projects. When accessing ELB, users need to switch to the authorized region.

Table 2 lists all the system-defined permissions for ELB. System-defined policies in role/policy-based authorization are not interoperable with those in identity policy-based authorization.

**Table 2** System-defined permissions for ELB
Role/Policy Name	Description	Type	Dependencies
ELB FullAccess	Administrator permissions for ELB. Users with these permissions can perform all operations on load balancers.	System-defined policy	None
ELB ReadOnlyAccess	Read-only permissions for ELB. Users with these permissions can only view ELB.	System-defined policy	None
ELB Administrator	All permissions on ELB resources.	System-defined role	Tenant Administrator, VPC Administrator, CES Administrator, Server Administrator, and Tenant Guest policies must be attached in the same project as ELB Administrator.

Table 3 lists the common operations supported by system-defined permissions for ELB.

**Table 3** Common operations supported by system-defined policies
Operation	ELB FullAccess	ELB ReadOnlyAccess	ELB Administrator
Creating a load balancer	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Querying a load balancer	Supported	Supported	Supported
Querying a load balancer and associated resources	Supported	Supported	Supported
Querying load balancers	Supported	Supported	Supported
Modifying a load balancer	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Deleting a load balancer	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Adding a listener	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Querying a listener	Supported	Supported	Supported
Modifying a listener	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Deleting a listener	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Creating a backend server group	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Querying a backend server group	Supported	Supported	Supported
Modifying a backend server group	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Deleting a backend server group	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Adding a backend server	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Querying a backend server	Supported	Supported	Supported
Modifying a backend server	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Deleting a backend server	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Configuring a health check	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Querying a health check	Supported	Supported	Supported
Modifying a health check	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Disabling a health check	Supported	Not supported	Supported
Assigning an EIP	Not supported	Not supported	Supported
Binding an EIP to a load balancer	Not supported	Not supported	Supported
Querying an EIP	Supported	Supported	Supported
Unbinding an EIP from a load balancer	Not supported	Not supported	Supported
Viewing monitoring metrics	Not supported	Not supported	Supported
Viewing access logs	Not supported	Not supported	Supported

Identity Policy-based Authorization

ELB supports authorization with identity policies. Table 4 lists all the system-defined identity policies for ELB. System-defined policies in identity policy-based authorization are not interoperable with those in role/policy-based authorization.

**Table 4** System-defined identity policies for ELB
Identity Policy	Description	Type
ELBFullAccessPolicy	All permissions on ELB resources	System-defined identity policies
ELBReadOnlyAccessPolicy	Read-only permissions for ELB	System-defined identity policies

Table 5 lists the common operations supported by system-defined identity policies for ELB.

**Table 5** Common operations supported by system-defined identity policies
Operation	ELBFullAccessPolicy	ELBReadOnlyAccessPolicy
Creating a load balancer	Supported	Not supported
Querying a load balancer	Supported	Supported
Querying a load balancer and associated resources	Supported	Supported
Querying load balancers	Supported	Supported
Modifying a load balancer	Supported	Not supported
Deleting a load balancer	Supported	Not supported
Adding a listener	Supported	Not supported
Querying a listener	Supported	Supported
Modifying a listener	Supported	Not supported
Deleting a listener	Supported	Not supported
Creating a backend server group	Supported	Not supported
Querying a backend server group	Supported	Supported
Modifying a backend server group	Supported	Not supported
Deleting a backend server group	Supported	Not supported
Adding a backend server	Supported	Not supported
Querying a backend server	Supported	Supported
Modifying a backend server	Supported	Not supported
Deleting a backend server	Supported	Not supported
Configuring a health check	Supported	Not supported
Querying a health check	Supported	Supported
Modifying a health check	Supported	Not supported
Disabling a health check	Supported	Not supported
Assigning an EIP	Not supported	Not supported
Binding an EIP to a load balancer	Not supported	Not supported
Querying an EIP	Supported	Supported
Unbinding an EIP from a load balancer	Not supported	Not supported
Viewing monitoring metrics	Not supported	Not supported
Viewing access logs	Not supported	Not supported
Querying enterprise projects	Supported	Supported