Glossary

Account

Brightbox services are provided through an Account. A typical customer has at least one Account through which they manage their resources, such as Cloud Servers and Load Balancers. It is possible to create multiple Accounts, for example, to manage resources for separate customers of your own.

See the Accounts page for more information.

Account Limits

Each Account is created with default resource limits which determine the total Cloud Server RAM, the number of Cloud IPs and the number of Load Balancers which may be in use at any one time. A default limit is applied to all new Accounts on creation, but you can request an increase to each of the 3 limits at any time via Brightbox Manager.

API Client

An API Client is a set of credentials (client_id and secret), belonging to an Account, used to authenticate with the API via OAuth 2.0

Each Account can have multiple API Clients.

Brightbox Manager

Brightbox Manager is our old web-based GUI, available at https://manage.brightbox.com. It’s now deprecated in favour of the Control Panel.

CLI

The CLI (or “Command Line Interface”) is the primary method of creating and managing resources, such as Cloud Servers and Load Balancers, with Brightbox Cloud.

See the CLI guide for more information.

Cloud IP

Cloud IPs are publicly accessible IP addresses that can be mapped instantly to Cloud Servers and Load Balancers. Cloud IPs belong to the Account they are created on until they are destroyed (i.e released back into the pool for other customers to use).

Cloud IPs can be mapped and re-mapped to any Cloud Server or Load Balancer belonging to the same Account.

For more information on Cloud IPs, see the Cloud IP guide.

Cloud Server

Cloud Servers (or “Server”) are individual virtual machine instances, created from a specific Image and of a specific Server Type, belonging to an Account.

Cloud SQL instance

A Cloud SQL instance is a relational database server, with automatic security updates and backups.

Console

The Graphical Console provides direct access to a Cloud Server, as if sat at a physical keyboard.

Control Panel

The Control Panel is our new web-based GUI which can be used to manage resources. It’s accessible at https://cloud.brightbox.com

Firewall

The Cloud Firewall is a distributed stateful firewall for controlling access to, from and between Cloud Servers. See the Cloud Firewall Reference for more information.

Firewall Policy

A Firewall Policy represents a list of Firewall Rules and is usually associated with a Server Group.

Firewall Rule

A Firewall Rule defines some kind of network traffic to be accepted by the Cloud Firewall. It is always associated with a Firewall Policy.

Image

An Image (or Cloud Server Image) is a virtual disk image from which a Cloud Server can be created. Brightbox provides several “official” images for common OSes, but you can create your own - either by snapshotting existing servers or uploading new images (see Image Library Guide).

For for more information, see the Server Image reference.

Image Library

The image library provides storage for Images. It can be used to download (export) snapshots, or upload new images for use on Brightbox.

Interface

An Interface (or “Network Interface” or “Cloud Server Interface”) represents the virtual network interface of a Cloud Server. Currently, a single Interface is created on each Cloud Server - but it is planned that multiple Interfaces will be supported in future.

Load Balancer

A Load Balancer (or “Cloud Balancer”) is an individual cloud Load Balancer instance belonging to an Account. Load Balancers enable you to create scalable and fault tolerant systems by distributing traffic across a pool of Cloud Servers.

For more information, see the Load Balancer guide

Server Group

A Server Group is a logical grouping of Cloud Servers. They’re the foundation of other Brightbox features, such as the Cloud Firewall. For more information see the Server Group guide.

Server Type

A Server Type represents a particular set of Cloud Server specifications, in terms of RAM size, disk size/type and number of CPU cores.

For more information, see the Server Types reference page.

Region

A Region represents a geographical area.

Regions are identified by a region code, which consists of a 2-letter ISO 3166-1 country code followed by a digit e.g. GB1, DE1, US2 etc.

At present there is one Region (GB1), located in Northern England, UK.

User

A User represents a person. It may have access to many accounts, whether as the Owner or with limited permissions.

User Data

User Data is arbitrary metadata that can be specified when creating a new Cloud Server. The specified user data is available to the Server via the Metadata service.

Zone

A zone represents a collection of physical hosts and provide a simple way to ensure that cloud servers are hosted on different hardware.

For high availability, simply create Cloud Servers in multiple zones and use Load Balancing to distribute traffic across them.