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jeperry edited this page Feb 6, 2013 · 8 revisions

Personas

In user-centered design, a persona is an imaginary archetypal user, invented for the purpose of understanding who will use our product. The purpose of creating personas for Aeolus is to document a shared vision of what are we building and who are we building it for.

While scrum user stories state the purpose of each individual feature, they don’t provide a clear idea of who will need such thing in the first place. This leaves room for endless debates about whether features are needed or not. Through fundamental agreement on Personas, we are able to make project decisions with less friction.

Recommended reading to learn more about personas and why they are useful:

Personas for Aeolus

  • Intrastructure Manager - I make the decision on how we move to the cloud, and I’m accountable for showing the ROI.
  • Security Admin - I make sure our cloud computing is done securely. I consult with the system administrator to design policy to keep sensitive data safe.
  • SysAdmin - I carry the pager and respond to quota problems and outages. I’m also the one who implements what others have defined in the policy.
  • Application Designer - I create the components for others to use and respond to erratas that impact what has already been created.
  • Infrastructure Consumer - I start and stop latest versions of applications in the cloud; sometimes for myself and sometimes for other departments or users. (Not currently addressed by Aeolus Conductor*)

Infrastructure Manager

Marty: I make the decision on how we move to the cloud, and I’m accountable for showing the ROI.

Cloud-based responsibilities

Strategy Development

  • Enterprise strategy

Provider selection and policy development

  • Evaluation, selection, contracts/SLA negotiation
  • Sets and enforces provider standards
  • Communicates policies to the others to define within the system

Keeping the infrastructure up and running

  • Responsible for oversight of infrastructure management activities
  • Enable infrastructure consumers to receive cloud usage statements
  • Track cloud-based services
  • Maintain network connectivity and data replications between corporate and cloud data centers
  • Deploys infrastructure and application portals that enable self-service

Biggest Cloud Concerns

  • Efficiency
  • ROI
  • Uptime Promise
  • Availability
  • Storage and Compute Costs
  • Portability
  • Governance
  • Resource Utilization
  • Bandwidth
  • Scalability

Interface Usage Tendencies

GUI: High CLI: Low

Common Applications

Monitoring and Reporting, spreadsheets, word processing

% of all users

< 10%

Security Administrator

Sarah: I make sure our cloud computing is done securely. I consult with the system administrator to design policy to keep sensitive data safe.

Cloud-based responsibilities

Security

  • Set cloud provider specific default security settings and policies
  • Set default data and network security settings
  • Defines network and storage policy
  • Communicates policies to the System Admin

Governance

  • Set cloud management platform where security policies can be enforced

Biggest Cloud Concerns

  • Information Flow Enforcement
  • Supervision
  • Systems documentation
  • Access Control
  • Placement Policy Definition

Interface Usage Tendencies

  • GUI: Medium-High
  • CLI: Low-Medium

Common Applications

Network and storage monitoring, word processing

% of all users

< 10%

System Administrator

Sam: I carry the pager and respond to quota problems and outages. I’m also the one who implements what others have defined in the policy.

Cloud-based responsibilities

User and resource management

  • Quota management, dynamic capacity planning
  • Account management
  • Defines and manages users who access the system

Connectivity and cloud network policy enforcement

  • Enforce network policy
  • Ensure adequate capabilities exist to perform data back-up
  • Enforce disk or network encryption for certain types of applications

Backups and monitoring

  • Extend existing backup management solutions
  • Leverage existing monitoring infrastructure with cloud provider instrumentation data
  • Monitoring running instances

Incident and outage management

  • Responds to incidents and outages in services related to cloud resources

Biggest Cloud Concerns

  • Incident and Outage Management
  • Availability
  • Backups
  • Network Policy Enforcement
  • Monitoring
  • Quotas
  • Resource and User Management

Interface Usage Tendencies

  • GUI: Medium-High
  • CLI: High

Common Applications

Monitoring, Dashboards, Product interfaces, traffic sniffing

% of all users

40%

Application Designer

Dennis: I create the components for others to use and respond to erratas that impact what has already been created.

Cloud-based responsibilities

Content and configuration definition and management

  • Define and maintain software specific to vm’s and their templates
  • Ensures what was specified is what was actually created
  • Manage environments using images and templates to satisfy the needs of a consumer
  • Ensure that consumers can quickly provision standardized applications containing specific software
  • Ensure that applications are available in the environments they are intended to be used in

Content remediation

  • Monitoring for and addressing security erratas
  • Monitoring for and addressing bug fix erratas
  • Update what’s currently running

Biggest Cloud Concerns

  • Application lifecycle management
  • Template creation
  • Content remediation
  • Standardized operating environments

Interface Usage Tendencies

GUI: Medium-High CLI: Medium

Common Applications

Programming tools

% of all users

40%

Infrastructure Consumer

Not currently addressed by Aeolus Conductor

Connor: I start and stop latest versions of applications in the cloud; sometimes for myself and sometimes for other departments or users.

Cloud-based responsibilities

Use, start and stop what’s been defined

  • Leverage computing infrastructure
  • Request and decommission computing infrastructure

Cloud application management

  • Start the latest version of an application
  • View cloud resource usage reports
  • Monitor deployments
  • Troubleshoot deployments
  • Modify compute resources allocated to application
  • Request access control changes to application resources
  • Request data and/or network security controls be enabled or disabled

Biggest Cloud Concerns

  • Request resources
  • Usage monitoring
  • Deployment lifecycle management
  • Troubleshooting
  • Not thinking about or interested in the cloud itself

Interface Usage Tendencies

GUI: High CLI: Low-Medium if technical

Common Applications

VMWare VCenter, Amazon EC2, RHEV-M, HP OpenView, Tivoli; potentially completely new to cloud and virt.

% of all users

50%+

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