Roles
The Cloud Foundry operator is responsible for the day-to-day operation of Cloud Foundry. The responsibilities of the operator include, but are not limited to:
- Creating and modifying resources (organizations, spaces, quotas, services) needed for Abacus or the Resource providers.
- Scaling Cloud Foundry installation to fit usage requirements.
- Updating parts of the Cloud Foundry landscape:
- Buildpacks (new runtimes)
- Stemcells (OS or security fixes)
- Infrastructure services (Diego, ELK)
- Marketplace services
The operator's responsibilities are often shared between several teams, organizations, and companies. For example you might have:
- CloudOps (Amazon, Google Cloud, Azure, OpenStack operation)
- Cloud Foundry operators (CF operation)
- DevOps teams (operating infra and user-facing services)
The user is the customer who uses software (SaaS), applications (PaaS), or resources (IaaS) from the Cloud Foundry system. The user is charged for the consumed resources.
The main responsibility of the Abacus integrator is the correct functioning of the Abacus components. In addition, the integrator is in charge of the following:
- Managing the integration and functioning of the Abacus pipeline with Cloud Foundry.
- Requesting (from the CF operators), monitoring, and provisioning the required memory, network and database resources for Abacus.
- Handling any integrations with services you can deploy along with Abacus, such as monitoring, logging, auditing, BPEM processes, billing system, and usage analytics.
The resource provider is in charge of providing resources to the users, usually in the form of backing services. Resource providers meter the resource usage by generating the usage events (documents) and submitting them to Abacus.
Resource providers can define the structure of the data specific to a cloud resource with three different plans: Metering, Rating, and Pricing Plan. The “measured usage” data which is sent in the usage document conforms to the measures and metrics defined in the plans.
The Usage consumer requests usage reports from Abacus. Such reports can be presented directly to the user or used to feed external systems like monitoring or billing.
The diagram below shows the Resource Provider and Resource Consumer roles:
