Introduction

You can use IAM to perform refined permission management for your enterprise projects. If your Huawei Cloud account does not need individual IAM users, you can skip this chapter.

A policy is a set of permissions defined in JSON format. 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. For details about the syntax structure and examples of policies, see Enterprise Project Permissions.

There are fine-grained policies and role-based access control (RBAC) policies. An RBAC policy consists of permissions for an entire service. Users in a group with such a policy assigned are granted all of the permissions required for that service. A fine-grained policy consists of API-based permissions for operations on specific resource types. Fine-grained policies, as the name suggests, allow for more fine-grained control than RBAC policies.

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

An account has all 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 allowing the actions can call the API successfully. For example, if an IAM user wants to query ECSs using an API, the user must have been granted permissions that allow the ecs:servers:list action.