Basic 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).

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 are 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 as universal regions and dedicated regions. A universal region provides universal cloud services for common tenants. A dedicated region provides services of the same type only or for specific tenants.

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 allow you to build cross-AZ high-availability systems.

Default projects are defined to group and isolate resources (compute, storage, and network) across regions. You can grant users permissions to access resources in the region associated with a default 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 isolation model

To view a project ID, go to the My Credentials page.