Help Center/ Cloud Connect/ API Reference/ Permissions and Supported Actions/ Introduction
Updated on 2024-10-14 GMT+08:00
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Introduction

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

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 the 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

Assigning 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

User-policy
  • System-defined identity policies
  • Custom identity policies
  • Assigning identity policies to principals
  • Attaching identity policies to principals

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.

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 attach the policy to the users or grant the users the access permissions to the specified regions. Identity policy-based authorization is more flexible than role/policy-based authorization.

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 permissions required for calling an API are determined by the actions supported by the API. Only users who have been granted permissions allowing the actions can call the API successfully.

Assume that an IAM user wants to call an API to query cloud connections. With role/policy-based authorization, the IAM user must be granted the permissions allowing for action cc:cloudConnections:list. With identity policy-based authorization, the IAM user must be granted the permissions allowing for action cc:cloudConnections:list.

Parent Topic: Permissions and Supported Actions