The reference architecture considers key stakeholders that are involved in the end-to-end service management, life cycle management, and operations of the infrastructure and the applications running on it.
- Cloud provider
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The CSP operations personnel who are responsible for provisioning and on-boarding all day 0 and day 1 functions to enable services for target customers and tenants.
- Consumer
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The end user who is consuming the services that the tenants provide. For example, IoT devices, mobile handsets, API consumers, and MVNO.
- Customer
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The enterprise or entity who owns the business relationship with the CSP. The customer might be an internal line of business such as fixed line and mobile services and can also be an external enterprise.
- Tenant
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A tenant represents a logical separation of the entity housed on and consuming infrastructure services to a provide a service. This may be a specific subset of customers for the Telco, an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) which operates on top of the Telco infrastructure to provide their own virtual network, or a VNF vendor which provides a specific capability and so on. Each tenant is represented as a resource slice. Key resources that can be packaged in a resource slice are mobile network bandwidth, specific services enabled, number of subscribers, and so on.
- Operations Support
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The operations management process and team that ensure the services are operating to meet the promised stringent SLAs.
- System Planning
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The operations management planning function that is responsible for the resource and VNF capacity and forecasting and new data center designs.
- Security Operations
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Security operations function that is responsible for all aspects of security, network, application, and data.
