Overview

The Nectar Cloud is Australia’s purpose built cloud for Research, providing computing services and tools for researchers for free.

A Project is a group of one or more users sharing an allocation of resources. Projects are used to manage access to resources and to track resource usage. Each project has a unique name and a unique ID.

Also called an instance. These are VM instances that use a particular pre-defined image to create a virtual machine. Contains all the usual features such as CPU, memory, disk, and network interfaces.

A user is an account associated with an email address, and contains account-related information, such as public-private key pairs, Nectar OpenStack password or Application Credentials. These are not users of instances - those are created and managed separately inside the VMs.

For most cases, there are just two roles: a TenantManager who has full control over the project, and a Member who has limited control over the project.

An assignment is a delegation of a role to a user, for a specific project. For example, some users may be assigned the role of TenantManager for a project, while others may be assigned the role of Member. This is how the Nectar Cloud manages access control.

An image is a file that contains a copy of the operating system and the software installed on a VM. Images are used to create new VM instances. The Nectar Cloud provides a number of pre-defined images that you can use to create new VM instances.