Basic Concepts

Common concepts used when you call APIs are described as follows:

• Account

  An account is created upon successful registration with Huawei Cloud. 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 IAM users and grant them permissions for routine management.

• IAM user

  An IAM user is created by an account to use cloud services. Each IAM user has its own identity credentials (password or 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 will be required for API authentication.

• Region

  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 Global region and specific regions. The Global region provides common cloud services for all tenants, and a specific region provides services of the same type or provides special services for specific tenants.

  For details, see Region and AZ.

• AZ

  An Availability Zone (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 resources (including compute, storage, and network resources) across physical regions. A default project is provided for each Huawei Cloud 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, you can create subprojects under a default project and purchase resources in subprojects. Then you can assign required permissions for users to access only the resources in specific subprojects.

  Figure 1 Project isolating model
  

• Enterprise Project

  Enterprise projects group and manage resources across regions. Resources in enterprise projects are logically isolated from each other. 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.