Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) compartments are a fundamental organizational construct that allow you to isolate and manage resources within your Oracle Cloud environment. Compartments provide a way to group resources together and control access and permissions for those resources. Here are the key attributes of OCI compartments:

1. Isolation and Organization: Compartments provide a way to isolate and organize resources within your OCI tenancy. You can group resources based on departments, projects, applications, or any other logical division that suits your needs.
2. Access Control: Compartments serve as a unit of access control. You can define policies that grant or restrict access to resources within specific compartments. This helps ensure that only authorized users and services can interact with the resources they need.
3. Resource Management: Each compartment can contain a wide range of OCI resources, such as compute instances, storage volumes, databases, networking components, and more. This makes it easier to manage and track resources associated with specific projects or teams.
4. Security Boundaries: Compartments provide security boundaries that help prevent unauthorized access to resources. Users and services need appropriate permissions to access resources within a compartment.
5. Resource Quotas: You can set resource quotas for each compartment to control the amount of resources that can be provisioned within that compartment. This helps prevent overconsumption of resources and ensures fair distribution across different projects or teams.
6. Hierarchy: Compartments can be organized in a hierarchical manner, allowing you to create parent and child compartments. This hierarchy provides additional flexibility in organizing resources and permissions.
7. Tagging and Billing: Compartments can be tagged to help with cost allocation and billing. Tags enable you to track expenses and associate costs with specific projects or teams.
8. Lifecycle Management: Compartments provide a way to manage the lifecycle of resources. You can easily delete a compartment and all its associated resources when they are no longer needed.