Customer Visible Objects
The Extility platform present a number of different resource types. The resources visible to end users are as follows:
- Servers (Virtual Machines)
- Disks
- IP Addresses
- VDCs
- VLANs (or Networks)
- Firewalls
- Images
- Snapshots
- Disk Clones
- Operating System Images
These are explained in more detail in the product manual, and in the customer API manual.
Admin Visible Objects
The following resources are also visible to administrative users:
- Billing Entities
- Customers
- Users (or Contacts)
- Product Offers
These are explained in more detail in the product manual but a brief explanation of each follows below. All resources have a UUID (a Universally Unique Identifier). Several calls allow passing resources of different sorts. Objects other than resources do not, in general, have associated UUIDs.
- A Billing Entity is an administrative unit that groups customers together, and is capable of issuing bills. The Master Billing Entity is the Billing Entity which operates the platform, to which all other Billing Entities belong. Each customer is owned by a Billing Entity. Administrative users can only administrate the Billing Entity they belong to and its customers, unless they belong to the Master Billing Entity, in which case they have administrative access to all Billing Entities.
- A Customer is an owner of virtual resources who receives billing for those resources. A Customer belongs to exactly one Billing Entity.
- A User (occasionally referred to as a Contact) is a person authorised to manipulate the virtual resources of a Customer. A user belongs to exactly one Billing Entity. A user can be associated with zero or more customers in the Billing Entity concerned, by use of groups.
- A Product is a template specifying the technical configuration of virtual resources, is in general created by the Master Billing Entity, and spans the whole system.
- A Product Offer is the commercial terms under which the Product is sold. There might be more than one Product Offer per Product, and Product Offers can differ by Billing Entity.
Aside from resources, you will encounter the following objects in the Jade Admin API:
- Invoices
- Invoice Items
- Promotions
- Promotion Codes
- Product Purchases
- Unit Transactions
- Unit Transaction Summaries
- Query Limits
- Search Filters
Each of these is explained under the documentation for the relevant objects.
It is likely that most of your calls to Jade AdminAPI, will be read operations, querying the system. All queries can be made using calls starting with the word 'list', even calls that aim to return a single item. Most of these relate to resources. Each list call returns a list of a specific type of resource based on a supplied query. That query is specified in Flexiant Query Language (FQL), as a Search Filter and a Query Limit. See the section on FQL below for how this works.