Interests and relations, regarding the three categories of stakeholders which analysed in the Blog Post entitled “RAINBOW Platform Stakeholder Analysis: The 3 Categories of Stakeholders”, were investigated further, in order to identify RAINBOW’s key stakeholders, in the Blog Post “RAINBOW Platform Stakeholder Analysis: RAINBOW’s key stakeholders“. Furthermore, applications and markets that may benefit from RAINBOW outcomes were presented in the Blog Post “RAINBOW Platform Stakeholder Analysis: Applications and markets that may benefit from RAINBOW outcomes“.
The following paragraphs introduce the identified user roles for the RAINBOW ecosystem.
RAINBOW platform is a complex system which potentially engages multiple stakeholder roles to fully exploit all its components and make it altogether available as a turn-key solution. RAINBOW ecosystem involves four technical roles with diverse responsibilities. Some of these responsibilities may overlap among users of the platform which, at first, may seem to lead to confusing interpretation of user role duties. However, usually for small software teams, the silver lining between roles in the development team are quite blur, with team members often taking responsibilities spread across different user roles (e.g., service developer and operator). In the following, the Actor terminology and descriptions are designed to clarify and summarize each actor’s roles.
Service Developer
The Service Developer is a person (or a team) that develops a Fog application or a part of it by using the RAINBOW API, RAINBOW-compliant libraries, deployment description and primitives in order to run on a RAINBOW-compliant Fog execution environment. This role also includes responsibilities such as, unit testing, software features updates and maintenance of fog application’s services.
Service Operator
The Service Operator (aka Platform Operator) is the person providing the vision for multiple fog applications as a project, gathering and prioritizing user requirements and overseeing the business aspects of deployed applications (e.g. business delivery, functioning and services of the application) in accordance with various criteria (e.g. cost minimization and policy definition like legal constraints). This role is also responsible for the supervision of any hardware failure (e.g., network or fog node fails) and takes the appropriate actions to notify the respective Infrastructure Provider.
Infrastructure Provider
The Infrastructure (Cloud and Fog) Provider is the organization that provides Fog services in the form of programmable infrastructure according to a service-level agreement. The Fog Provider is also responsible to operate the Execution Environments in proximity to the end-users and/or IoT devices that will host entirely or partially RAINBOW-compliant Fog Applications.
RAINBOW Developer
The RAINBOW Developer is the person (or a team) that creates RAINBOW related (software) components for compliant Fog and Cloud Providers and/or Engineers such as e.g. Monitoring Probes, Modelling Primitives, services utilizing the RAINBOW API.
