Overview of Managing Access Permissions to Your Amazon DocumentDB Resources

    Note

    An account administrator (or administrator user) is a user with administrator permissions. For more information, see IAM Best Practices in the IAM User Guide.

    When granting permissions, you decide who is getting the permissions, the resources they get permissions for, and the specific actions that you want to allow on those resources.

    In Amazon DocumentDB, the primary resource is a cluster. Amazon DocumentDB supports other resources that can be used with the primary resource such as instances, parameter groups, and event subscriptions. These resources are referred to as subresources.

    These resources and subresources have unique Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) associated with them, as shown in the following table.

    Amazon DocumentDB provides a set of operations to work with the Amazon DocumentDB resources. For a list of available operations, see .

    A resource owner is the AWS account that created a resource. That is, the resource owner is the AWS account of the principal entity (the root account, an IAM user, or an IAM role) that authenticates the request that creates the resource. The following examples illustrate how this works:

    • If you use the root account credentials of your AWS account to create an Amazon DocumentDB resource, such as an instance, your AWS account is the owner of the Amazon DocumentDB resource.

    • If you create an IAM user in your AWS account and grant permissions to create Amazon DocumentDB resources to that user, the user can create Amazon DocumentDB resources. However, your AWS account, to which the user belongs, owns the Amazon DocumentDB resources.

    • If you create an IAM role in your AWS account with permissions to create Amazon DocumentDB resources, anyone who can assume the role can create Amazon DocumentDB resources. Your AWS account, to which the role belongs, owns the Amazon DocumentDB resources.

    A permissions policy describes who has access to what. The following section explains the available options for creating permissions policies.

    Note

    This section discusses using IAM in the context of Amazon DocumentDB. It doesn’t provide detailed information about the IAM service. For complete IAM documentation, see What Is IAM? in the IAM User Guide. For information about IAM policy syntax and descriptions, see in the IAM User Guide.

    Policies that are attached to an IAM identity are referred to as identity-based policies (IAM policies). Policies that are attached to a resource are referred to as resource-based policies. Amazon DocumentDB supports only identity-based policies (IAM policies).

    You can attach policies to IAM identities. For example, you can do the following:

    • Attach a permissions policy to a user or a group in your account – An account administrator can use a permissions policy that is associated with a particular user to grant permissions for that user to create an Amazon DocumentDB resource, such as an instance.

    The following is an example policy that allows the user with the ID 123456789012 to create instances for your AWS account. The new instance must use an option group and a parameter group that starts with default, and it must use the default subnet group.

    For more information about using identity-based policies with Amazon DocumentDB, see Using Identity-Based Policies (IAM Policies) for Amazon DocumentDB. For more information about users, groups, roles, and permissions, see in the IAM User Guide.

    Resource-Based Policies

    Other services, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), also support resource-based permissions policies. For example, you can attach a policy to an S3 bucket to manage access permissions to that bucket. Amazon DocumentDB doesn’t support resource-based policies.

    For each Amazon DocumentDB resource (see ), the service defines a set of API operations. For more information, see Actions. To grant permissions for these API operations, Amazon DocumentDB defines a set of actions that you can specify in a policy. Performing an API operation can require permissions for more than one action.

    The following are the basic policy elements:

    • Resource – In a policy, you use an Amazon Resource Name (ARN) to identify the resource to which the policy applies.

    • Action – You use action keywords to identify resource operations that you want to allow or deny. For example, the permission allows the user to perform the DescribeDBInstances operation.

    • Principal – In identity-based policies (IAM policies), the user that the policy is attached to is the implicit principal. For resource-based policies, you specify the user, account, service, or other entity that you want to receive permissions (applies to resource-based policies only). Amazon DocumentDB doesn’t support resource-based policies.

    To learn more about IAM policy syntax and descriptions, see in the IAM User Guide.

    For a table showing all of the Amazon DocumentDB API actions and the resources that they apply to, see Amazon DocumentDB API Permissions: Actions, Resources, and Conditions Reference.

    To express conditions, you use predefined condition keys. Amazon DocumentDB has no service-specific context keys that can be used in an IAM policy. For a list of global condition context keys that are available to all services, see in the IAM User Guide.