Basic Concepts

Account

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 to perform routine management. For security purposes, create IAM users and grant them permissions for routine management.

User

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.

Region

A region is a geographic area where cloud resources are deployed. Availability zones (AZs) in the same region can communicate with each other over an intranet, while AZs in different regions are isolated from each other. By creating cloud resources in different regions, you can better meet customer requirements and comply with local laws and regulations.

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.

Project

Projects group and isolate 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. If you need more refined access control, create subprojects under a default project and purchase resources in subprojects. Then you can assign users the permissions required to access only the resources in the specific subprojects.

Figure 1 Project isolating model