How do I delegate view-only access to our app teams without giving them the kitchen sink?

contrarian_coder · 2026-08-03T22:31:02Z

Everyone’s raving about how InsightCloudSec makes cloud security “accessible” to developers. Right up until you try to actually let an app team see their own resources without also handing them the keys to delete your entire production environment or view the CFO’s secret S3 bucket. So, you want view-only access. The console suggests you just slap them into a pre-built “Viewer” role and call it a day. I tried that. A week later, a well-meaning engineer from the payments team nearly triggered a compliance incident because that role also allowed exporting asset data with all PII to a CSV. Whoops. The real trick is crafting a custom role that’s actually read-only for *their* scope, not the whole account. You’ll spend more time in the permission matrix than you’d like. Here’s a rough sketch of a programmatic approach I fumbled through, because the UI tends to be... optimistic. ```python # This isn't actual InsightCloudSec API code, but a conceptual outline of the steps. # You're essentially building a policy that: # 1. Scopes the group to a specific OU or project tag. # 2. Grants ONLY 'read' actions on a limited set of asset types. # 3. Explicitly DENIES 'export', 'modify', 'delete', 'remediate'. # Pseudo-steps: # - Create a new custom role via API (UI is brittle for this). # - Define permissions: ["cloud:asset:read", "cloud:scan:read"] # - Attach a resource filter like: "tag.team = 'payments' AND cloud.type = 'aws'" # - Create a user group, assign the role and the filter. # - Pray the inheritance model doesn't override your denies. ``` The pitfall? Their documentation makes this seem like a three-click wizard. In practice, you’ll find that “view” permissions are often bundled with surprising entitlements in certain service modules. Test extensively in a dummy org first. And monitor the audit logs—you’ll likely see a few failed “unauthorized” actions as you dial it in, which is how you know it’s working. Has anyone else found a less painful way to do this, or are we all just accepting that “secure delegation” is an oxymoron in most cloud security platforms?

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infra_architect_rebel_alt

(@infra_architect_rebel_alt)

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05/08/2026 5:09 am

Step zero is the only step that actually matters, and most teams skip it because it forces uncomfortable conversations about what "sensitive" really means. Your point about excluding certain *Describe* or *Get* actions is correct, but even that gets diluted when teams inevitably lobby for exceptions because their app "needs" to read the raw data to function.

We ended up defining read-only as "cannot initiate a network transfer to an endpoint outside our VPC or generate a pre-signed URL." That immediately excluded S3 GetObject, RDS data API queries, and, yes, those cursed CSV exports. It's a functional definition, not an API model definition, and it's held up better.

keep it simple

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chloep

(@chloep)

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05/08/2026 5:37 am

"Optimistic UI" is such a kind way to put it. It's less optimism and more willful ignorance of the gulf between "read" in a marketing slide and "read" in a real IAM policy. Your CSV export example is the perfect poster child.

That programmatic outline is the only way, but the real time-sink isn't step two. It's deciding which services are even allowed on the "limited set of asset types" list. Does "view their EC2 instances" mean they can also view the security groups, which exposes other network paths? Suddenly you're down a rabbit hole of implied dependencies.

And god help you if someone from legal later decides "view" shouldn't include reading user-data scripts. Back to the matrix.

Demos are just theater. Show me the real workflow.

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