An account is created upon successful registration with HUAWEI CLOUD. The account has full access permissions for all of its cloud services and resources. It can be used to reset user passwords and grant user permissions. The account is a payment entity and should not be used directly to perform routine management. For security purposes, create IAM users and grant them permissions for routine management.

An IAM user is created using an account to use cloud services. Each IAM user has its own identity credentials (password and access keys).

An IAM user can view the account ID and user ID on the My Credentials page of the console. The account name, username, and password will be required for API authentication.

Regions are divided based on geographical location and network latency. Public services, such as Elastic Cloud Server (ECS), Elastic Volume Service (EVS), Object Storage Service (OBS), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Elastic IP (EIP), and Image Management Service (IMS), are shared within the same region. Regions are classified into universal regions and dedicated regions. A universal region provides universal cloud services for common tenants. A dedicated region provides specific services for specific tenants.

For details, see Region and AZ.

An AZ contains one or more physical data centers. Each AZ has independent cooling, fire extinguishing, moisture-proof, and electricity facilities. Within an AZ, computing, network, storage, and other resources are logically divided into multiple clusters. AZs within a region are interconnected using high-speed optical fibers to support cross-AZ high-availability systems.

Projects group and isolate resources (including compute, storage, and network resources) across physical regions. A default project is provided for each region, and subprojects can be created under each default project. Users can be granted permissions to access all resources in a specific project. For more refined access control, create subprojects under a project and create resources in the subprojects. Users can then be assigned permissions to access only specific resources in the subprojects.

Figure 1 Project isolating model

Enterprise projects group and manage resources across regions. Resources in enterprise projects are logically isolated from each other. An enterprise project can contain resources in multiple regions, and resources can be directly transferred between enterprise projects.

For more information about enterprise projects and how to obtain enterprise project IDs, see Enterprise Management User Guide.