Resource groups are used to group your resources based on usage, permissions, and regions, so that you can manage the resources in a hierarchical manner based on users and projects. Each resource can belong to a single resource group. The correlation between resources does not change after they are added to resource groups.
Background information
- The following resources can be managed in resource groups: instances, disks, images, ENIs, security groups, and key pairs.
- Resources cannot be transferred between resource groups across accounts.
- A resource group can contain resources from different regions. For example, Resource Group A can contain instances from the China (Beijing) and China (Hangzhou) regions.
- If resources that belong to different resource groups in the same account are located within the same region, these resources can be correlated with each other. For example, an instance in the China (Beijing) region of Resource Group A can be added to a VPC in the China (Beijing) region of Resource Group B.
- Resource groups inherit the global permissions of their corresponding RAM users. If you authorize a RAM user to manage all Alibaba Cloud resources in your Alibaba Cloud account, all resource groups in your Alibaba Cloud account are accessible to in the RAM user.
Scenarios
- Add resources for different purposes to different resource groups for separate management. For more information, see Scenario 1: Group resources based on their usage.
- Set an independent administrator for each resource group to manage users and their permissions based on resource groups. For more information, see Scenario 2: Manage users and their permissions based on resource groups.
Scenario 1: Group resources based on their usage
You can add instances from the production environment to the resource group of the production environment. You can add instances from the test environment to the resource group of the test environment. To test a service, we recommend that you perform operations on instances only within the resource group of the test environment to prevent incorrect operations on instances within the production environment. Before you release a service, you can perform operations on instances within the resource group of the production environment to ensure that the service functions properly.
Scenario 2: Manage users and their permissions based on resource groups
You can add instances used by different departments within your company to different resource groups and set different administrators to manage these instances based on departments. In this topic, an IT department and a finance department are used as examples.
Other scenarios
For more information about other application scenarios of resource groups, see Use RAM to create and authorize resource groups.