Creating Users in the Oracle Cloud

In this section, we are going to look at creating users in the Oracle Cloud. I realized that in last section, there were already users that we added to the groups that we created. However, you can create users basically at any time and add them to the different groups as needed. The reason for creating the groups first will allow you to add the permissions and set up the policies and things that you will need for those groups before you even think about adding users to the account.

So going back to our Oracle Cloud dashboard, we are in the identity section of that environment. And we’re going to look at users. Under the users, we can create users. This will allow us to just create a local user in our cloud environment.

So in creating this user, we give it a name– developer one. We can also give it a description. We’ll just use the same. And then the email will be the email that’s used for password recovery, so that the developer can actually reset his own password and not necessarily always be sending emails back and forth to the OCI administrator.

And then we just press create. And now you see that we have developer one created. It is not a federated account, because it’s a local account the cloud environment. If we click on the developer one, account you will see the different information that we can do for it.

Right now, we can have a local password. We have API keys and auth tokenizations. We can add keys. And again, over here to the left, we have groups. So if we click on groups, we can add user to a group.

And since we just created the developer group. Will click on add user to group. And we will see that we have the Developers Demo group, and we will add that user to that group. And now that user is now part of that group. So any permissions we give to the Developers Demo, they will have access to.

When we initially create a user, they don’t have any permissions to the Oracle Cloud account. So by default, they really don’t have any permissions to do anything. We have to grant those through the groups and policies that we grant to those users.

Using API keys is an important way to connect different services that are provided in the Oracle Cloud. So we want to also take a quick look on how to add API keys to our individual user. So if we go down, we scroll down, we see our resources. And we have API keys.

We’re going to add a public key to this user. So if you can see that, public keys must be in PEM format. This is not the same key that you would use to connect to your infrastructure. These are not your SSH keys.

So in the Windows environment, you’re able to generate your API key using open SSL. You can create that on your Windows machine by downloading Git Bash. I use Git Bash to also access my Git Repositories. So it’s a tool that I normally use, anyhow.

But you need to also check and make sure that you can download it to your machine before using it. The other thing is, with Active Directory, you may be able to get an API key from your administrator. So check on that as well.

But here are the commands to get a open SSL API key for your user. So you would go into Git Bash. And you would type the command open SSL generate RSA. And you would give it the file name.

And I have here a password that I need to use for this key. So every time I use this key, I will enter my password to be able to use it. So when I generate that, you will see on the screen, however, my password. So I’m just going to use testing.

And now this key has been generated in my OCI directory on my machine. And I would pull this key up. And I’m just going to copy this key after opening it up in the file that it was created.

And after I copy this key, I can go back to my where I’m going to add a public key. And I’m just going to paste it in. And I’m going to hit add. Now my key has been created, and I have that fingerprint available to me to use for different APIs that this user might be needing.

That is creating a user that is local in the Oracle Cloud environment. Next, we’re going to look at how we bring in other users from our federated environment and our other enterprise users.