Basic Concepts

Organization

An organization is an entity that you create to manage multiple accounts. Each organization is composed of one management account, multiple member account, a root OU, and other OUs. An organization has exactly one management account along with several member accounts. You can organize the accounts in a hierarchical, tree-like structure with the root OU at the top and nested OUs under it. Each member account can be directly under the root OU or placed under one of the other OUs.

Root OU

Organizations automatically generates the root OU for you when you enable Organizations to create an organization. The root OU is located at the top of the tree, and its branches represent other OUs and accounts reaching down.

OUs

An OU is a container or grouping unit for member accounts. It can be understood as a department, a subsidiary, a project family, or the like, of your enterprise. An OU can also contain other OUs. Each OU can have exactly one parent OU, but a parent OU can have multiple child OUs or nested member accounts.

Service control policies

Service control policies (SCPs) are a type of organization policy that you can use to manage permissions in your organization. The management account can use SCP to limit the permissions that can be assigned to member accounts in an organization. You can attach an SCP to your organization, OUs, or member accounts. Any SCP attached to an organization or OU affects all the accounts within the organization or under the OU. For details, see Overview of an SCP.

Tag policies

Tag policies are a type of policy that can help you standardize tags across resources in your organization's accounts. A tag policy is only applied to tagged resources and tags that are defined in that policy. For details, see Overview of a Tag Policy.

URN

A uniform resource name (URN) is used to uniquely identify a cloud service resource.

A URN is in the following format: <service-name>:<region>:<account-id>:<type-name>:<resource-path>

• service-name: the abbreviation of a cloud service name in lowercase, for example, ecs. The abbreviation must be valid and cannot be a wildcard.
• region: the region where the resource is located, for example, cn-north-1. If the resource is a global service resource, leave this field blank or use asterisks (*) to replace it.
• account-id: the ID of the account. The value system indicates public system resources, such as system-defined policies.
• type-name: the resource type in lower camel case.
• resource-path: the resource path whose format is defined by the cloud service.