Terminology

The following terms related to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are used in this guide:

Oracle Cloud Console (or Console)

The web-based user interface you can use to access and manage Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Tenancy

Tenancy represents the secure partition or location within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure where you can create, organize, and administer your cloud resources. When you sign up for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,  Oracle creates a tenancy for your organization, business, department, or groups, as appropriate.

Compartments

Compartments allow you to organize and control access to your cloud resources. A compartment is a collection of related resources (such as instances, virtual cloud networks, block volumes) that can be accessed only by certain groups that have been given permission by an administrator. A compartment should be thought of as a logical group and not a physical container. When you begin working with resources in the Console, the compartment acts as a filter for what you are viewing.

When you sign up for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle creates your tenancy, which is the root compartment that holds all your cloud resources. You then create additional compartments within the tenancy (root compartment) and corresponding policies to control access to the resources in each compartment. When you create a cloud resource such as an instance, block volume, or cloud network, you must specify to which compartment you want the resource to belong.

Oracle Cloud Identifier (OCID)

Every Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resource has an Oracle-assigned unique ID called an Oracle Cloud Identifier (OCID). This ID is included as part of the resource's information in both the Console and API.

Regions and Availability Domains

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is physically hosted in regions and availability domains. A region is a localized geographic area, and an availability domain is one or more data centers located within a region. A region is composed of one or more availability domains. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources are either region-specific, such as a virtual cloud network, or availability domain-specific, such as a compute instance.

For more information, see Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation.