This topic describes the basic terms that are used in the Cloud Control API.
Resource metadata
Resource metadata includes the attributes, types, relationships, and behaviors of resources. All resource management is implemented based on resource metadata. GetResourceType helps you obtain the metadata of a specified resource and interpret the metadata in response parameters.
The information in resource metadata can be divided into three parts: basic information, attributes, and extended information of a specified resource.
Basic information includes the name, associated service, description, deployment level, and billing method of a resource.
Attributes include the description of specific resource attributes, the collection of private operation parameters, and the collection of sensitive attributes.
Extended information includes authorization and resource capacity information, such as the authorization policy, throttling policy, and quota.
Parent resources and child resources
Parent resources and child resources are logical concepts used to describe the dependencies between resources owned by the same product. Parent resources includes child resources, and child resources belong to parent resources. The logical relationship between different hierarchies of resources helps you implement resource management on child resources.
How to determine whether a resource belongs to a parent resource
If the resourceType of a resource metadata is in the ****/**** format, the resource belongs to a parent resource. For example, ApsaraDB for Redis contains an ApsaraDB for Redis instance named DBInstance and a database account named DBInstance/Account. If the resourceType of the database account is DBInstance/Account, the database account belongs to a parent resource. The resourceType of the parent resource is DBInstance, which is an ApsaraDB for Redis instance.
How to perform resource management on a resource that belongs to parent resource
When you call an API operation to perform resource management on a resource that belongs to a parent resource, you must add the information of parent resource to the request path. For more information, see the requestPath of API request parameters in API Directory.
Synchronous and asynchronous operations
Synchronous and asynchronous operations are two modes of task execution. The difference is that a synchronous operation returns after the task is completed, while an asynchronous operation returns without waiting for the task to finish.
In most cases, the Cloud Control API operations such as resource querying, listing or updating, and metadata querying are synchronously processed. Time-consuming tasks such as resource creation and deletion are asynchronously processed to improve service stability.
If the status code "202" is returned when you call the Cloud Control API operation to create an asynchronous task, you can call the GetTask operation to query the status of the asynchronous task.