Concepts

An account is created upon successful registration. 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 Identity and Access Management (IAM) users and grant them permissions for routine management.

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

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.

An AZ comprises one or multiple physical data centers equipped with independent ventilation, fire, water, and electricity facilities. Computing, network, storage, and other resources in an AZ are logically divided into multiple clusters. AZs within a region are interconnected using high-speed optical fibers to allow you to build cross-AZ high-availability systems.

A project corresponds to a region. Projects group and isolate resources (including compute, storage, and network resources) across physical regions. Users can be granted permissions in a default project to access all resources in the region associated with the project. If you need more refined access control, create subprojects under a default project and create resources in subprojects. Then you can assign users the permissions required to access only the resources in the specific subprojects.

Figure 1 Project isolation model