Consider yourself the machine administrator in a multinational organization with many branches and a plethora of various operating divisions. Special approvals must be given to representatives of each office area, department, and team in order for them to have sufficient access to cloud services.
Alibaba Cloud Resource Access Management (RAM) is a service that meets this requirement and more. It allows you to create and manage the Alibaba Cloud access permissions for employees, systems, applications, and other identities. And best of all, it is completely free to use!
With RAM, you can create multiple identities under one Alibaba Cloud account. This allows you to keep your Alibaba Cloud account and password strictly confidential in cases where multiple users in your enterprise need to collaboratively manage and access cloud resources. It also allows you to grant the users the minimum required permissions to ensure superior security.
RAM works by using identities knows as "RAM users". Each RAM user can represent a system, an application, or an individual user in your organization.
You can also create "RAM user groups", identities that contain multiple RAM users. RAM user groups allow you to set the access control of whole groups of staff members or systems. For example, you could group all staff in the marketing department into one RAM user group and then configure their permissions at one time.
It's worth pointing out that both RAM users and RAM user groups are "physical identities", in that the users have set username and password credentials that they use to log on to the Alibaba Cloud console. (They can also use an AccessKey pair.)
Interestingly, RAM also has non-physical, virtual roles, known as "RAM roles". These roles are identities to which permission policies are attached. However, RAM roles do not have logon passwords or AccessKey pairs. Instead, an entity user (Alibaba Cloud account, RAM users, or Alibaba Cloud services) assumes a RAM role, and the entity user can then obtain and use an STS token to access the authorized resources. RAM roles are divided into the following types based on the entrusted entity:
As mentioned earlier, RAM is free of charge for Alibaba Cloud users. One thing worth noting though is that all costs incurred by the identities under an Alibaba Cloud account are charged to that Alibaba Cloud account. Always be careful about granting permission to users for creating and modifying the configurations of your cloud resources so you aren't hit with any unexpected bills.
RAM allows you to create and manage multiple identities under an Alibaba Cloud account, and grant diverse permissions to a single identity or a group of identities. In this way, you can authorize different identities to access different Alibaba Cloud resources. The following is a list of RAM features:
Alibaba Cloud Resource Access Management (RAM) allows you to create and manage the Alibaba Cloud access permissions for employees, systems, applications, and other identities. RAM is supported on resources including ECS instances, networking services, database services, security, analytics, and more. This time, I'll show you how to get started by creating a RAM user with some specific permissions.
First, a few additional things it's useful to know:
Alibaba Cloud Resource Access Management (RAM) is an identity and access control service which enables you to centrally manage your users (including employees, systems or applications) and securely control their access to your resources through permission levels. RAM thereby allows you to securely grant access permissions for Alibaba Cloud resources to only your selected high-privileged users, enterprise personnel and partners. This helps to ensure secure and appropriate usage of your cloud resources and protects from any unsolicited access to your account.
This topic describes how an enterprise that has multiple cloud resources can use Resource Access Management (RAM) to manage user permissions to access the cloud resources.
This topic describes how to apply access and security settings to your Alibaba Cloud resources by using RAM. This allows you to better manage resource permissions with fine-grained access control.
Introduce the RAM service of Alibaba Cloud and demo for creating RAM user and RAM role and how to switch from a RAM user to a RAM role.
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