The reference architecture considers key stakeholders that are involved in the end-to-end service management, life cycle management, and operations.

Cloud provider

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

The end user who consumes the services that the tenants provide. For example, IoT devices, mobile handsets, API consumers, and MVNO.

Customer

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

The various classes of services (offers) that a customer provides to their consumers. Each tenant is represented as a resource slice; hence a customer can have one or more tenants. A mobile line of business can offer slices to an MVNO customer, for example a tenant for voice services and a tenant for data services.

Operations Support

The operations management process and the team that ensure the services are operating to meet the promised stringent SLAs.

Network Planning

The operations management planning function that is responsible for the resource and VNF capacity and forecasting, and new data center designs.

Security Operations

Security operations function that is responsible for all aspects of security, network, application, and data.