How to Manage Users
The primary billing unit within Payara Cloud is a subscription. Upon signing up, a new subscription is generated for you, with a separate invoice issued for each subscription. You have the flexibility to invite multiple users to your subscription, and conversely, a user can be a member of more than one subscription.
The detailed steps of managing users are described in Reference Guide Manage Users. This document aims to outline the typical configurations.
Roles in Payara Cloud
It’s acknowledged that within any infrastructure product, there are two principal administrative roles: one who utilizes the infrastructure and another who covers the costs for the infrastructure. Both roles require adequate access to pertinent sections of the user interface, hence Payara Cloud delineates these roles as follows:
An Administrator possesses full authority over the infrastructure utilization, specifically entailing any operation concerning namespaces and applications.
A Billing Manager holds comprehensive authority regarding financial matters such as costs and payments. They can modify invoicing data, update payment methods, cancel a subscription, or initiate an additional one, leveraging the existing payment methods. However, by default, they lack access to the infrastructure as it’s generally not within their purview.
If necessary, a user can assume a combined role as Billing Manager with Administrative privilege, which is the default role assigned to a user upon sign-up.
A user with restricted access is referred to as Member. They are barred from accessing billing data and performing namespace operations. More fine-grained access control is slated for future versions.
Both Administrators and Billing Managers have the capacity to invite additional users to the subscription and allocate roles to them. However, only a Billing Manager can confer or rescind Billing Manager roles.
Role Scenarios
As different companies will have different requirements, the follow scenarios give general suggestions on how the permissions can be configured for different organisations.
Scenario 1: Small team
For a small team with a high level of trust, you may opt to assign everyone the role of Billing Manager with Administrative privilege.
If it’s undesirable for every team member to have the authority to initiate new subscriptions, then the bulk of the team should be Administrators, with a select few — ideally at least two — assuming the role of Billing Manager with Administrative privilege.
Scenario 2: Separate procurement
In larger organisations, a procurement or finance department may require access to invoices and management of payment methods, while remaining uninvolved in the actual product usage concerning namespace and application management.
In such scenarios, the advisable approach is to invite responsible procurement personnel to the subscription as Billing Managers. It’s also recommended to set a procurement email as the invoicing email via Manage Billing > Update Invoice Information.
Subsequently, the initial user may transition their role to Administrator, entrusting all financial management to the invited Billing Managers.
Note that post transitioning the initial user role to Administrator, reverting back to Billing Manager will no longer be possible as this right is exclusively reserved for Billing Managers. However, the dialog will prevent the removal or demotion of the last Billing Manager.
Scenario 3: Protecting namespaces
Operations at the namespace level significantly impact your operation: for instance, removing custom domain mapping could render all applications within the namespace inaccessible, while deleting a namespace is a destructive and irreversible action.
Should you prefer to restrict namespace-level operations to a smaller group of users, assign the role of Member to the remainder of the team.
Members retain the ability to execute all actions at the application level, with more fine-grained control set for future releases.