Managing Users

Users represent identities that can access Plakar Control Plane. They are used either by people interacting with the web interface or by applications authenticating to the API.

Plakar Control Plane supports two types of users:

• Member: a person who signs in to the web interface and interacts with Plakar Control Plane.
• Application: a non-human identity used by software to authenticate to the Plakar Control Plane API using an access key.

Application users are intended for automation and integrations, such as the Plakar Kubernetes Operator or custom applications that interact with the API.

Creating users

You can create either a Member or Application user depending on how the identity will access Plakar Control Plane.

Organizations can be described in simple terms as containers for users and resources. Membership in an organization is what gives a user access to that organization’s resources.

Users are identified by their email address, and that identity is shared across the entire Plakar Control Plane deployment. You add a user to an organization by providing a name and an email address, and the result depends on whether that email address is already known:

• If no user with that email address exists, the user is created and added as a member of the organization.
• If a user with that email address already exists, that user is added as a member of the organization. No new user is created, and the existing credentials remain unchanged.

Permissions are scoped to an organization as well. A user who belongs to several organizations holds a separate set of roles in each one, so the same person can have full administrative access in one organization and limited access in another. Nothing granted in one organization carries over to another.

See Permissions for how access is granted, and Managing Organizations for information about managing organization membership.

Removing users from an organization

Removing a user from an organization revokes their access to that organization and its resources. Because a user identity is shared across the deployment, the user itself is not deleted and their memberships in other organizations are unaffected.

A user who has been removed from every organization remains in Plakar Control Plane but cannot sign in, because they no longer have access to anything. The account becomes usable again once the user is added to an organization, and the existing credentials continue to work.

Roles are not retained when a user is removed. A user who is added back to an organization starts with no permissions again, exactly like a newly created user, and must be granted the roles they need.

Member users

Member users authenticate through the Plakar Control Plane web interface. When a user belongs to more than one organization, the organization they work in is determined by the account they sign in with. See Signing In documentation for more details.

Creating a member user

To create a member user, select Member as the user type, then provide the user’s name and email address. You then select the organization the user is added to.

If the email address does not belong to an existing user, Plakar Control Plane creates the user and generates a password for them. Once the user has been created, their account and generated password are displayed. Pass both to the user, because they need the account to sign in to this organization. See Signing In for how accounts are formed.

The generated password is used only for the first sign-in. After authenticating for the first time, the user will be required to set a new password before accessing Plakar Control Plane.

If the email address belongs to a user who already exists, that user is added to the organization and keeps their current password.

A newly created member user has no permissions in the organization. They can sign in, but they cannot access any resources or perform any operations until permissions are granted to them.

Application users

Application users authenticate to the Plakar Control Plane API using API keys instead of interactive credentials. They are intended for automation and integrations, such as the Plakar Kubernetes Operator or custom applications.

Creating an application user

To create an application user, select Application as the user type, then provide a name for the application user and the organization it belongs to. API requests made with the application’s keys operate within that organization.

Once you create an application user, you can immediately generate an API key to authenticate API requests.

API keys

Application users authenticate to the Plakar Control Plane API using API keys. Each application user can have multiple API keys, allowing different services or deployments to use separate credentials.

To create an API key, open the application’s API key dialog, optionally provide a description, then generate the key. The generated key is used to authenticate API requests on behalf of the application user.

The API key management dialog also lists all existing API keys for the application, allowing you to review and delete keys that are no longer needed.

User roles

A user’s access is determined by the role assigned to them within each organization. Because roles are scoped to an organization, the same user may hold a different one in each organization they belong to. A user might administer the AWS organization while only being able to run backups in the VMware organization.

Roles apply to application users in the same way they apply to member users. An application user with no role assigned can authenticate with its API key but cannot do anything with it.

See Permissions for the roles that can be assigned and exactly what each of them reaches.