Introduction

This topic describes fine-grained permissions management for your Enterprise Router resources. If your account does not need individual IAM users, you may skip this topic.

By default, new IAM users do not have any permissions assigned. You need to add a user to one or more groups, and assign policies or roles to these groups. The user then inherits permissions from the groups. After authorization, the user can perform specified operations on cloud services based on the permissions.

You can grant users permissions by using roles and policies. Roles: A type of coarse-grained authorization mechanism that defines service-level permissions based on user responsibilities. There are only a limited number of roles for granting permissions to users. Policies: A type of 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 secure access control.

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

An account has all of the permissions required to call all APIs, but IAM users must be assigned 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 can call the API successfully. For example, if an IAM user wants to query the enterprise router list using an API, the user must have been granted permissions that allow the er:instances:list action.