I used to love that segment on sesame street. I loved the firemen and the cops and the muppet barbers. The truth is, you have to get to know your neighbors –and that’s particularly important when you’re building a community resource, like a cloud.

So, who’s involved? Well, Gartner analyst Donna Scott and I were talking about this a few weeks back, and she had some pretty great insights. I think there are 2 ways to slice the people involved – by what they used to do (which I touched on in a post on What to Expect When You’re Expecting Cloud, and You and What Army?) .. and then there are the roles that they WILL do, in the brave new world. Let’s take a moment to think about those.

  1. The Cloud Architect. Someone needs an overall vision of this new cloud. Typically, there is a single individual or small team that manage the definition of the cloud environment, and its interactions with the rest of the IT infrastructure.
  2. The Service Designer: This benevolent individual understands that different users have different needs, and spends his or her time designing different services to meet the needs of each user, setting options, determining different roles and locking down elements to ensure each user gets precisely the right cloud service.
  3. The Tenant Manager: Sometimes separate from the service designer, the tenant managers manage who has access to the cloud, which roles have which permissions, and so on.
  4. The Cloud Administrators: These honorable folks handle the care and feeding of the entire cloud, ensuring it has capacity, is optimizing utilization, and is meeting SLAs.
  5. The Supplier Managers: There are some forward-thinking companies who are approaching public clouds from a supplier-management perspective. We’re applauding them.
  6. The Performance Team: In some firms, there are even folks who care for the performance of the cloud – separating out the operations from the SLA. This is happening more and more.
  7. The Users: Like the fans at a rock concert, there’s no cloud without users. Hello Chicago!

Who are these people in your cloud neighborhood? They’re the people that you meet. When you’re walking down the street. They’re the people that you meet each day!

Posted by Lilac Schoenbeck