huaweicloud-services-overview

Huawei Cloud services overview

This project aims to be like a cheatsheet for Huawei Cloud by listing common services, a brief description of them and links to their respective Help Center page.

Useful links

Cloud Console
Help Center - services documentation, tutorials (“Getting Started” tab) and FAQs (“Self Service” tab)
Worldwide Infrastructure - check which services are available in each Region
Price Calculator
Public Cloud Services Comparison - see how Huawei Cloud services are named on other cloud providers

For developers:

General concepts

AZ: Availability Zone 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.

Region is a group of AZs based on geographical location and network latency. Public services such as ECS, EVS, OBS, VPC, EIP and IMS are shared within the same region.

Pricing: resources on Huawei Cloud are billed by different modes. The most common ones are: yearly/monthly, where you choose the period specified and you are charged in advance (prepaid); and pay-per-use, a postpaid mode where you are billed by a rate that can be based by time (e.g. hourly rate) or resource usage (e.g. traffic, data volume, number of calls). There are some free services as well, and also services that have a free tier/quota. Some service’s final price can be composed of other resource’s pricing as well. See ECS billing for example.

Computing

ECS: Elastic Cloud Server, a virtual machine on the Huawei Cloud. Basic computing unit that consists of vCPUs, memory, OS, and Elastic Volume Service (EVS) disks.

ECS Flavor: name given to the ECS specifications. Combination of number of vCPUs, vCPU frequency, memory and Network QoS. Flavors are named in the AB.C.D format, where A is the type, B is the type ID, C is the number of vCPUs and D is the vCPU:memory ratio. Type can be: t for general computing basic; s for general computing; c for general computing plus; m for memory-optimized; d for disk-intensive; i for ultra-high I/O; h for high-performance; g for GPU graphics accelerated; p for GPU computing accelerated; k, Kunpeng architecture.

BMS: Bare Metal Server, a physical server integrated to Huawei Cloud. It provides dedicated servers on the cloud, delivering performance and security. BMSs are deployed in multiple AZs, and work with VPC, EIP, IMS, EVS, VBS, Cloud Eye and CBR services.

IMS: Image Management Service allows you to manage the entire lifecycle of your images. An image is a cloud server or disk template that contains an operating system (OS), service data, or necessary software. You can create ECSs or BMSs from public, private, or shared images. You can also create a private image from a cloud server or an external image file.

AS: Auto Scaling, a service that automatically adjusts resources based on your service requirements and configured AS policies. You can specify AS policies based on service requirements. AS can automatically adjust ECS and bandwidth resources. AS = (AS configuration) + (AS group) + (AS policies).

AS configuration defines the specifications of the ECS instances to be added to an AS group. The specifications include the ECS image and system disk size.
AS group is a collection of instances and AS policies that have similar attributes and apply to the same application scenario.
AS policy defines the conditions for triggering a scaling action and the operation that will be performed. When the triggering condition is met, a scaling action is triggered automatically. Conditions can be alarm (according to a metric value), scheduled (at a specified date and time) or periodic (at a configured interval, e.g. dayly, weekly, etc).

FunctionGraph is the serverless computing service of Huawei Cloud. It hosts and computes event-driven functions in a serverless context while ensuring high availability, high scalability, and zero maintenance. Write/upload your code in Node.js, Python, Java, Go, C#, or PHP; set execution conditions; and pay only for what you use (you are not charged when it’s not running).

DeH: Dedicated Host, a physical server that runs only ECSs from your account. Bring Your Own License (BYOL). Traditional ECSs, in contrast, run in a server together with ECSs from other accounts/tenants.

DeC: Dedicated Cloud, a complete resource isolation solution by using dedicated services, such as Dedicated Distributed Storage Service (DSS), Dedicated Enterprise Storage Service (DESS), and Bare Metal Server (BMS). DeH, in contrast, can provide only isolated compute hosts.

HPC: High-Performance Computing, a computer cluster system that connects multiple computer systems using various interconnection technologies. It relies on the integrated computing capability of all the connected systems to perform large-scale computing tasks.

Storage

Types

EVS: Elastic Volume Service is the block storage of Huawei Cloud. EVS disks are similar to hard disks in PCs. They must be attached to servers for use and cannot be used alone. You can initialize EVS disks, create file systems on them, and store data persistently on them. Cloud servers that EVS supports include ECSs and BMSs. EVS disks are sometimes just referred to as disks.

SFS: Scalable File Service provides scalable, high-performance file storage (Network Attached Storage, NAS). With SFS, you can enjoy shared file access spanning multiple ECSs, BMSs and containers created on CCE. SFS supports Network File System (NFS, for Linux) and Common Internet File System (CIFS, for Windows) protocols.

OBS: Object Storage Service is a scalable service that provides secure, reliable, and cost-effective cloud storage for massive amounts of data. OBS basically consists of buckets - a container for storing objects in OBS; and objects - the fundamental storage unit in OBS. There is no limitation on the storage capacity of the entire OBS system or of a single bucket, and any number of objects can be stored. There are three storage classes available: Standard, for frequently accessed files; Infrequent Access, for files accessed less than 12 times per year; and Archive, for data accessed once a year.

Backup and DR

CBR: Cloud Backup and Recovery enables you to back up ECSs, BMSs, EVS disks, SFS Turbo file systems, local files and directories, and on-premises VMware virtual environments with ease. CBR consists of: backups, the copies of particular chunks of data; vaults, where the generated backups are stored; and policies, which can be for backup or for replication, and set execution times, frequency and retention rules. CBR integrates Cloud Server Backup Service (CSBR) and Volume Backup Service (VBS), which were separate services in the past.

SDRS: Storage Disaster Recovery Service provides cloud disaster recovery (DR) for your data centers. If your on-premises or cloud data center fails, you can fail over services to the DR center on Huawei Cloud, and then fail back the services after the production center recovers.

Others

CDN: Content Delivery Network is a smart virtual network on the Internet infrastructure. CDN can cache origin content on nodes closer to users, so content can load faster. CDN speeds up site response and improves site availability.

DES: Data Express Service is a TB-scale data transmission service. It provides physical storage devices (such as Teleport, external USB hard disks, SATA disks, and SAS disks) to make it easier for you to transmit terabytes of data to HUAWEI CLOUD.

DSS: Dedicated Distributed Storage Service provides you with dedicated storage pools which are physically isolated from other pools to ensure high security. By flexibly interconnecting with various compute services, such as Dedicated Computing Cluster (DCC), ECS and BMS, DSS is suitable for different scenarios, including HPC, online analytical processing (OLAP), and mixed loads.

Networking

VPC: Virtual Private Cloud enables you to provision logically isolated virtual private networks for cloud resources, such cloud servers, containers, and databases. You can create custom subnets, security groups, network ACLs, and assign EIPs and bandwidths. By default, ECSs in all subnets of the same VPC can communicate with one another, but ECSs in different VPCs cannot.

Subnet is a unique CIDR block with a range of IP addresses in a VPC. All resources in a VPC must be deployed on subnets. When you create a VPC, a default subnet will be created together.
Security Group is a collection of access control rules for cloud resources that have the same security protection requirements and that are mutually trusted. Those rules will apply to all cloud resources added to the security group. Rules can be for inbound traffic (into the protected services) or outbound traffic (originated from the protected services), and can allow or deny such traffic based on source/destination, protocol and port.
Network ACL is an optional layer of security for your subnets. After you associate one or more subnets with a network ACL, you can control traffic in and out of the subnets.

EIP: Elastic IP is a public IP address that can be accessed directly over the Internet. An EIP consists of a public IP address and some amount of public network egress bandwidth. EIPs can be bound to or unbound from ECSs, BMSs, virtual IP addresses, NAT gateways, and load balancers.

ELB: Elastic Load Balance automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple backend servers based on the listening rules you configure, eliminating single points of failure. ELB = (Listener) + (Backend server group).

Listener uses the protocol and port you specify to check for requests from clients and route the requests to associated backend servers based on the listening rules and forwarding policies you configure. Supports Layer 4 (TCP and UDP) and Layer 7 (HTTP and HTTPS) protocols.
Backend server group contains one or more backend servers to receive requests routed by the listener. You need to add at least one backend server to a backend server group. You can set a weight for each server in the backend server group. The larger the weight is, the higher proportion of requests the backend server receives. Backend servers can be dynamically added/removed through an Auto Scaling setup.

NAT Gateway is a network address translation (NAT) service. It can be a public NAT gateway or a private NAT gateway. A public NAT gateway uses an EIP to enable cloud and on-premises servers in a private subnet to access the Internet (source NAT, SNAT), or to make services in a VPC accessible from the Internet (destination NAT, DNAT). Private NAT gateways allows ECSs and BMSs in a VPC to communicate with servers in other VPCs or on-premises data centers, translating the source and destination IP addresses of originating packets into a transit IP address.

VPN: Virtual Private Network establishes an encrypted, Internet-based communication tunnel between your on-premises data center and a VPC, so that you can access service resources in the VPC from your on-premises data center. Currently, only IPsec VPN is supported, in a site-to-site scheme.

DNS: Domain Name Service is a highly available and scalable authoritative DNS service that translates domain names (such as www.example.com) into IP addresses (such as 192.1.2.3) required for network connection. The DNS service allows users to visit your websites or web applications with domain names.

Direct Connect allows you to establish a stable, high-speed, low-latency, secure dedicated network connection that connects your on-premises data center to Huawei Cloud. Direct Connect allows you to maximize legacy IT facilities and leverage cloud services to build a flexible, scalable hybrid cloud computing environment.

VPCEP: VPC Endpoint is a cloud service that provides secure and private channels to connect your VPCs to VPC endpoint services, including cloud services or your private services. It allows you to plan networks flexibly without having to use EIPs. There are two types of resources: VPC endpoint services, which are cloud services or private services that you manually configure in VPCEP; and VPC endpoints, which are secure and private channels for connecting VPCs to VPC endpoint services.

CC: Cloud Connect allows you to connect VPCs in different regions to allow instances in these VPCs to communicate over a private network as if they were within the same network. You need to load network instances from these regions to a cloud connection and assign bandwidth for cross-region communications. (A network instance can be a VPC you create, a VPC of another user, or a virtual gateway you create for access from your on-premises data center.)

Management & Governance

CES: Cloud Eye is a multi-dimensional resource monitoring platform. You can use Cloud Eye to monitor the utilization of service resources, track the running status of cloud services, configure alarm rules and notifications, and quickly respond to resource changes. For server monitoring, after you install the Agent (Telescope) on an ECS or BMS, you can collect 60-second granularity ECS and BMS monitoring data in real-time. Cloud Eye provides 40 metrics, such as CPU, memory, and disk metrics. When the cloud service status changes and metrics reach the thresholds specified in alarm rules, Cloud Eye can notify you using SMN service, by emails, or by sending messages to server addresses, allowing you to monitor the cloud resource status and changes in real time.

SMN: Simple Message Notification is a reliable and flexible large-scale message notification service. SMN involves two roles: publisher and subscriber. A publisher publishes messages to a topic, and SMN then delivers the messages to subscribers in the topic. The subscribers can be email addresses, phone numbers, message queues, and URLs. A topic is a collection of messages and a logical access point, through which the publisher and the subscriber can interact with each other.

IAM: Identity and Access Management is a basic service of HUAWEI CLOUD that provides permissions management to help you securely control access to your cloud services and resources. An account is created after you successfully register with HUAWEI CLOUD. Your account has full access permissions for your cloud services and resources and makes payments for the use of these resources. For different teams or applications in your enterprise, you can create IAM users for the team members or applications and grant them permissions required to complete tasks. The IAM users use their own usernames and passwords to log in to HUAWEI CLOUD and access resources in your account.

CTS: Cloud Trace Service is a log audit service for Huawei Cloud security. It allows you to collect, store, and query resource operation records. You can use these records to perform security analysis, track resource changes, audit compliance, and locate faults. Log audit module is a core component necessary for information security audit and an important part for the information systems of enterprises and public institutions to provide security risk management and control.

LTS: Log Tank Service enables you to collect logs from hosts and cloud services for centralized management, and analyze large volumes of logs efficiently, securely, and in real time. LTS provides you with the insights for optimizing the availability and performance of cloud services and applications. It allows you to make faster data-driven decisions, perform device O&M with ease, and analyze service trends.

TMS: Tag Management Service is a visualized service for fast and unified cross-region tagging and categorization of cloud services. Tags are used to identify cloud resources. When you have many cloud resources of the same type, you can use tags to classify cloud resources by dimension (for example, use, owner, or environment).

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