Concepts

An account is created upon successful registration and 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, which should not be used directly to perform routine management. To ensure account security, create Identity and Access Management (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).

The account name, username, and password will be required for API authentication.

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

An availability zone (AZ) comprises one or more physical data centers equipped with independent ventilation, fire, water, and electricity facilities. Compute, 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 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 purchase 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 different enterprise projects are logically isolated. An enterprise project can contain resources of multiple regions, and resources can be added to or removed from enterprise projects.

For details about how to obtain enterprise project IDs and features, see the Enterprise Management User Guide.