Accounts in Yandex Cloud

Yandex Cloud uses Yandex accounts, service accounts, and federated accounts.

Yandex accountYandex account

Yandex account: Your Yandex or Yandex 360 account. Use this account type in the following cases:

• If you do not need to set up access permissions for your applications. Otherwise, use a service account.
• For smaller teams if you did not set up an identity federation in your organization (e.g., with Active Directory or Google Workspace). Otherwise, use federated accounts.

To better safeguard your resources from unauthorized access, enable Yandex ID two-factor authentication. Also, request users you add to your organization to enable it.

Federated accountsFederated accounts

A federated account is a user account from an identity federation, e.g., Active Directory.

With identity federations, a business can enable single sign-on to Yandex Cloud via their server. This allows the company employees use their corporate accounts to access Yandex Cloud.

Use federated accounts if you need to grant Yandex Cloud access to a large number of employees.

For more information, see SAML-compatible identity federations.

Service accountService account

A service account is an account that can be used by a program to manage resources in Yandex Cloud.

Service accounts allow you to set up flexible access to your resources and minimize risks associated with excessive permissions. Use this account type for your applications, YC CLI, Terraform, and Yandex Cloud API. For more information, see Service accounts.