The latest articles on Forem by Munagala Karthik (@karthiblip). https://forem.com/karthiblip https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F3867759%2F773d6f9f-cf2d-4807-bb7e-80353236215b.jpeg https://forem.com/karthiblip en Munagala Karthik Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:35:03 +0000 https://forem.com/karthiblip/things-kept-breaking-in-my-oci-lab-until-i-fixed-iam-3d78 https://forem.com/karthiblip/things-kept-breaking-in-my-oci-lab-until-i-fixed-iam-3d78 <p>Things kept breaking, and it wasn’t because I wrote bad code.</p> <p><strong>It was IAM.</strong><br> I was setting up a cloud lab in OCI and everything looked fine on the surface, instances, networking, policies.<br> But every time I tried to launch or manage resources, something failed.</p> <p>Not loudly. Just enough to slow everything down.<br> At first, I assumed it was a config issue.</p> <p>So I kept switching between tasks, checking networking, then compute, then scripts.</p> <p>That made it worse.<br> I wasn’t losing time… I was losing context.</p> <p>What finally worked was slowing down and tracing the failure properly.<br> I started reading the exact error messages and mapping them back to IAM policies.<br> That’s when I finally saw it.</p> <p>A small missing permission:<br> Allow group to read instance-images in tenancy<br> Once I added it, everything started working instantly.<br> No changes to code. No changes to architecture.<br> Just IAM.<br> <strong>Nothing else changed.</strong></p> <p>The biggest lesson?<br> Most cloud failures aren’t about what you built, they’re about what you forgot to allow.</p> <p>If something feels randomly broken in the cloud, start with IAM first.</p> <h1> CloudSecurity #IAM #OCI </h1> cloudsecurity iam oci