Overview
Four ideas explain most of what the console does. Read these and the individual screens stop needing explanation.Regions and zones
Every resource lives in an availability zone inside a region. This is why screens ask you where before they let you create anything.
Organization, tenants, and projects
Three distinct layers of ownership, and the context switcher that decides which one you’re acting in.
Jobs and events
Jobs answer “did my action finish?”. Events answer “what happened, when, and who did it?”.
Quotas and limits
What caps your account, where to see consumption, and what happens when you hit a ceiling.
How they fit together
Reading that top to bottom: your tenant owns everything. Activating a region gives the tenant an identity in a geographic location. Inside a region you use one or more availability zones, and in each zone you get a VPC with a network inside it. Virtual machines attach to that network, volumes attach to the machines, and a public IP is what makes a machine reachable from outside. Quotas cap how much of all this you can have; jobs and events tell you what the platform is doing and what it did.Vocabulary worth pinning down
The console has grown, and a few resources are known by more than one name. These pairs mean the same thing:These aren’t synonyms the documentation invented to be helpful — they’re genuinely both present in the product. Where a screen and the API disagree, this documentation uses the screen’s wording and mentions the API’s.