To use the Customer Management Service effectively, you should understand several key concepts.
Customer
A customer is an individual or a business entity that purchases products
or services, or both from Rackspace. Each customer is uniquely
identified by a number called Rackspace Customer Number (RCN).
Customer Account
A customer account represents part of a customer's portfolio across
Rackspace. This part of the portfolio can have product, contact,
billing, identity, and support configured for it. Conceptually, customer
accounts are independently managed. For example, a customer can have
multiple products associated with multiple accounts, such as a dedicated
server associated with a managed account and cloud servers, or cloud
files associated with a cloud account. The only link between the managed
and cloud accounts is that they belong to the same customer.
Contact
A contact is a person who is associated with a customer account. Each
contact is uniquely identified by a number called Rackspace Person
Number(RPN).
Metadata
Metadata are entity-specific data that can be stored for a customer
account. Metadata contains two fields: key and value.
The key is made up of two colon-delimited (:) elements: namespace and
key.
The value is a simple string value for the content management system
(CMS) to store for a particular element.
Metadata elements are open, read, and write restricted.