Overview of Yandex Identity and Access Management
The IAM service controls access to resources and lets you configure access rights. You determine who should have rights for a certain resource and what these rights are, while IAM grants access according to the assigned rights.
With IAM, you can:
- Grant access to resources.
- Manage accounts in Yandex Cloud.
- Manage authorization keys.
- Log in to Yandex Cloud.
Resource access
To grant a user access to a resource, you assign them roles for the resource. Each role consists of a set of permissions that describe operations that can be performed with the resource.
Before performing an operation with a certain resource (such as creating a VM), Yandex Cloud sends a request to the IAM service to check whether this operation is allowed. IAM compares the list of required permissions to the list of permissions granted to the user performing this operation. If some of the permissions are missing, the operation is not allowed and Yandex Cloud returns an error. For more information, see How access management works in Yandex Cloud.
Accounts in Yandex Cloud
To identify users performing operations with resources, use Yandex accounts, service accounts, or federated accounts.
Note
Billing accounts aren't used for managing resources in Yandex Cloud and aren't part of IAM. For more information, see Billing accounts in the billing documentation.
Yandex account
Yandex accounts are your accounts in Yandex.Passport or Yandex 360.
Note
To better safeguard your resources from unauthorized access, we recommend enabling two-factor authentication in Yandex.Passport. Use this method to secure your own account and ask every user you add to your cloud to enable two-factor authentication as well.
Service accounts
A service account is an account that can be used by a program to manage resources in Yandex Cloud.
By using service accounts you can flexibly configure access rights to resources for programs you wrote. For more information, see Service accounts.
Federated account
A federated account is a user account from an identity federation, like Active Directory.
By using identity federations, a company can set up Single Sign-On, which is authentication in Yandex Cloud via their server. This lets company employees use their corporate accounts to access Yandex Cloud.
For more information, see SAML-compatible identity federations.
Authorization keys
There are three different kinds of authorization keys in Yandex Cloud:
- API keys: Used instead of IAM tokens for simplified authorization.
- Authorized keys: Used to obtain IAM tokens for service accounts.
- Static access keys: Used in services with AWS-compatible APIs.
These keys are currently only used for service accounts.
Authorization
The user must pass authentication so that IAM can authorize them (i.e., check whether the user has rights). Authentication is performed in different ways, depending on the type of account and the interface used. For more information, see Authorization in Yandex Cloud.