How access management in Yandex.Cloud works

On this page, you can find out how to manage resource access and how IAM checks access rights to them.

How are access rights verified?

All operations in Yandex.Cloud are first sent for verification to IAM. For example:

  1. A user requests Yandex Compute Cloud to create a new disk in the default folder.
  2. The service sends a request to IAM to check whether this user is allowed to create disks in this folder.
  3. IAM checks if the user is a member of the cloud with the default folder and has the necessary permissions to create a disk in this folder.
  4. If the user does not have any of the permissions, the operation is not performed and Yandex.Cloud returns an error. If all the required permissions were granted, IAM reports this to the service.
  5. The service creates a new disk.


How do I perform access management?

Access management in Yandex.Cloud leverages the Role Based Access Control (RBAC) policy. To grant users access to a resource, you specify which roles are assigned to them for that resource.

To assign a role, select a resource, choose a role, and describe the subject assigned to the role. This lets you bind access rights to the resource.

You can also assign a role to a parent resource that access rights are inherited from, such as a folder or cloud.


Changing access rights usually takes 30 seconds or less, but it may take up to 5 minutes.

For example, you were given the right to create folders in the cloud and you were able to create one folder, but couldn't create another one. This is because the access rights have not yet been updated on the server where the second create folder operation was performed. Try creating the folder again.

Resources that roles can be assigned for

You can currently assign a role for a cloud, folder, or service account.

If you need to grant access to another resource, such as a VM, assign a role for the resource that access rights to that VM are inherited from, such as a folder.


Resource roles can be assigned by users with the administrator role for the resource, as well as the owners of the cloud that the resource belongs to.

Each role consists of a set of permissions that describe operations that can be performed with the resource. A user can assign a role with only those permissions which are available to themselves. For example, only the user with the cloud owner role can assign this same role. The administrator role is not enough for this.

To find out what roles exist and what permissions they include, see Roles.

Subjects that roles are assigned to

To assign a role, you should specify the subject this role is assigned to. From the viewpoint of IAM, a role is assigned to an access subject.

There are three types of subjects:

Assign access rights

Roles to a resource are assigned as a list of role-subject bindings. They are called access bindings. You can add or remove these bindings to control access rights to a resource.


Each binding is a single assignment of a role to a subject. To assign a user multiple roles to a resource, set a separate binding for each role.

Inheritance of access rights

If a resource has child resources, all permissions from the parent resource will be inherited by the child resources. For example, if you assign a user a role for a folder where a VM instance resides, all permissions of this role will also apply to the instance.

If a child resource is also assigned some roles, a list of permissions for this resource will be combined with a list of permissions for its parent resource.

See also

For more information about managing access to a specific Yandex.Cloud service, see the Access management section in the documentation on that service.

Step-by-step instructions and examples: