Help Center/ Database Security Service/ API Reference/ Permissions and Supported Actions/ Overview
Updated on 2025-11-25 GMT+08:00
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Overview

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

With IAM, you can control access to specific Huawei Cloudcloud resources from principals (IAM users, user groups, agencies, or trust agencies). IAM supports role/policy-based authorization and identity policy-based authorization.

The following table describes their differences.

Table 1 Differences between the two types of authorization

Name

Core Relationship

Permission

Authorization Method

Application Scenario

Role/Policy-based Authorization

User-permission-authorization scope
  • System-defined role
  • System-defined policy
  • 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 provides a limited number of condition keys and cannot meet the requirements of fine-grained permissions control. This method is suitable for small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Identity Policy-based Authorization

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 permission 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 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/identity policies and actions in the two authorization scenarios 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 required permissions are determined by the actions supported by the API. Only users with the policies allowing for those actions can call the API successfully.

Assume that an IAM user wants to call an API to query the audit instance. With policy-based authorization, the IAM user must be granted the permissions allowing for action dbss:servers:list. With identity policy-based authorization, the IAM user must have the dbss:cloudServers:listServersDetails action in their permissions to call the API.