Basic Concepts

An account is created upon successful registration with the cloud platform. 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.

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.

Regions are geographic areas isolated from each other. Resources are region-specific and cannot be used across regions through internal network connections. For low network latency and quick resource access, select the nearest region.

An availability zone (AZ) comprises of one or more physical data centers equipped with independent ventilation, fire, water, and electricity facilities. Computing, 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. 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 resources in specific subprojects.

Figure 1 Project isolation model