Associated Doc

What Is a Group and How Does Permission Inheritance Work Through Groups?

Updated on 13 April, 2026

Understand IAM groups on Vultr and how permission inheritance works. Groups let users inherit roles and policies automatically through group membership assignment.


A group is a customer-managed collection of users within an organization. Groups exist to simplify access management at scale. Rather than assigning permission policies or roles to each user individually, you assign them once to a group and all members inherit those assignments automatically.

Groups are created and managed entirely by you. Vultr does not create or pre-populate any groups. You define the group structure that fits your organization, for example by team, function, or product domain.

How Permission Inheritance Works?

When a permission policy or role is attached to a group, every current and future member of that group immediately inherits the permissions it grants. There is no additional action required. Adding a user to a group instantly extends all of the group's permissions to that user, and removing a user from a group instantly revokes them.

A user's effective permissions are the combined result of:

  • Permission policies attached directly to the user
  • Permission policies attached to any group they belong to
  • Roles assigned directly to the user
  • Roles assigned to any group they belong to

A user can belong to multiple groups simultaneously. If a user is a member of two groups that have overlapping permissions, those permissions are simply combined, there is no conflict.

Note
Groups manage the relationship between users and access within an organization. Removing a user from a group revokes the permissions they inherited through that group, but does not affect permissions they hold through direct assignments or other group memberships.