EGI Pay-for-Use PoC:Business Cases/Workplan

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List of selected business cases and overall workplan of agreed activities.

(To be developed)

Business Cases

Roles

• Consumer (User): The person actually using the service (user).
• Customer: The person or entity that negotiates the level of services and commissions the service provider or broker and may pay, doing so on behalf of a number of consumers (users).
• Resource Provider: An organisation offering access to ICT resources through service abstractions (e.g., computing power, storage).
• Broker: An organisation facilitating or arranging transactions and agreements between a customer and one or more resource providers.
• Technology Provider: A person or entity providing the required technology to support service delivery.

User Stories

The below list of potential questions that each role may ask or scenarios will shape User Stories for defining specific developments required. All information is being collected and articulated using a Google Doc. Once specific User Stories are defined. The below table will be updated and will feed the required technical developments.

See wikipedia page for more information regarding User Stories.

General

Define, at least, the "first level" or "base" service we are going to provide for each class of services.

• Architecture and OS (if not cloud)
• Type of access to the resources
• Costs (average or a range between providers?)
• Guaranteed (maximum?) amount of storage space (people have to store their outcomes)
• Type of support (only related to the resources or it also include support for software? (libraries, compilers, optimizations))
• Availability (how many (different?)_resources or (different?)_services can I use? Are they subject to availability? See https://documents.egi.eu/secure/RetrieveFile?docid=2032&version=1&filename=List_of_possible_3_QoS_levels_v_3.pdf)

By Roles

Role	Questions for Developing User Stories	Comments	Topic	Priority	Phase
Consumer	I want a list of the available services and their price	As a PoC, list of services that will have a price associated is HIGH	Pricing	Low	2nd
Consumer	Who helps me when issues arise ? Is this help cost and how much?	To be agreed, and then defined as part of the SLA	Support / SLA	Med	1st
Consumer	Where do I get information about your services?	This is connected to publishing information, which is low. The AP to be used at the start.	Service Catalogue	Low	2nd
Consumer	How can I access your services? Do you have a portal or something similar?	AP to be used at the start, more comprehensive tools to be explored.	Service Access	Low	2nd
Consumer	What is the price? Is it cheaper than the commercial cloud?	Need to have this justification/rational early	Pricing	High	1st
Consumer	If not, what is the difference with commercial clouds? What are the advantages or using yours?	Need to have this justification/rational early	Value Proposition	High	1st
Consumer	How can I pay for the services? Credit Card? Bitcoins?	Billing aspects/during PoC to start with invoicing/bank transfer; Tokens, credit cards, bitcoins for potential future/production	Payment	Med	1st
Consumer	Can I receive a formal invoice with my requirements to put it into my budget?	Yes. Will be part of AP development and JRA1 tool activity	Payment		1st
Consumer	How can I be sure the price is equal to the quality of resource?	Add rationale around acceptance of HEPSPEC - fully transparent within the SLA	Pricing / Service Quality	Med	1st
Consumer	Are any other communities paying for resources?	Start an initial list through the PoC, maybe add a survey question	Use Cases	High	1st
Consumer	Do you have Windows?	Yes, for the cloud resources; Overall, ambiguous and needs to be specified	Technical	Med	1st
Consumer	Do you support products with licensing (like ANSYS, that only allows licenses for a given customer, not shared) even if the license machine is at my site behind a firewall? how?	To be explored in 2nd phase	Licensing	Med	2nd
Consumer	Can I test for free? (only next 12 months or so)	This will be part of the 2nd phase in designing more comprehensive service packages	Service Package	Med	2nd
Consumer	Is your firewall open for what I need?	Part of our technical architecture and description	Technical	Med	1st
Consumer	I can't ftp, do you support dropbox?	More connected to storage, which is in a later phase - for now we are just accounting for current storage sites i.e. DPM and dCache	Technical	Low	2nd
Consumer	Do I need a certificate? who gives it?		Authentication
Consumer	Do I get a machine/service for me immediately at any time? will the machine be too busy? is the data transfer too slow? can I use Teamviewer?	This will be part of the 2nd phase in designing more comprehensive service packages	Service Package / SLA	Med	2nd
Consumer	Is there a Service Level Agreement?	Yes, we need to define this now as many other aspects depend on the contents	SLA	High	1st
Resource Provider	I want to set a price for the Grid Compute service on a HEPSPEC-hour (or hour?)	Part of initial core activities	Pricing	High	1st
Resource Provider	I want to set a price for the Cloud Compute service based on ....	Part of initial core activities	Pricing	High	1st
Resource Provider	I want to set a price for the Grid/Cloud Storage service based on GB per month	Instructions are available to do this	Pricing
Resource Provider	How much extra effort & on how many people does this require, and at what level?		Cost
Resource Provider	Can I pay such extra effort to those people?		Cost
Resource Provider	If I give a contact name, how many mails/calls will she/he receive?		Support / SLA
Resource Provider	When do I get the extra funds and under what constraints?		OLA / Contract
Resource Provider	Can I reject potential users that will create more problems than benefits? On what basis?		Security / SLA
Resource Provider	What are the legal issues if the customer is not in my country?		Legal / Policy
Resource Provider	Will digital certificates be used?		Authentication
Resource Provider	Do I know these users? (example, bitcoin "researchers") Does it make sense to work with them even if they say they work on research or innovation?		Legal / Policy
Resource Provider	Can parts of administration be outsourced? If so, what are the service costs? What are the benefits?		Business Model
Resource Provider	What agreements do I have to make and with whom?		Agreements
Resource Provider	Does VAT apply? If so, when?		Pricing / Legal
Resource Provider	We are a publicly funded institution, are there any known restrictions for selling services?		Legal / Policy
Technology Provider	What technologies are you lacking that we could offer or develop? Can I develop pay-per-use tools and deploy them? Can I charge for that?		Technology / Tools
Technology Provider	How do I get paid? who pays me? when?		Payment / Contract
Technology Provider	Who is our interface for e.g. agreements/contracts, requirements, improvement, support?		Business Model
Technology Provider	Can I deploy a contextualized solution? (may need to explain this)		Technical
Technology Provider	Do you run on Windows?		Technical
Technology Provider	Does it make sense to prepare something for mobile phones? (guessing no)		Service
Broker	What agreements do I have to make and with whom?		Agreements
Broker	How do I get paid? who pays me? when?		Payments
Broker	Do customers prefer a % and/or flat rate for broker services? Will it depend?		Business Model
Broker	How is revenue shared in federated service provision? (e.g. GOCDB, Acct Portal)		Business Model
Multi	Do I have to get involved in the communication between provider and user after an agreement/contract is signed? If yes, how do I get a percent or a contract for support?		Technical
Multi	How can I teach this to the users?		Support
All	How can I learn what is this about?		Service Description

Workplan Overview

January 2014: Kick-off of the activity

• Hold first call - 23 Feb 2014 @ 12:00 CET (TBC)
• Establish fixed day and time for semi-monthly calls

April 2014: First phase implementation of all technical specifications, list of required agreements and refinements to policy issues documented in the EGI Sustainability Plan (M48)

• Technical
  • Review technical detail table and complete with relevant information
  • Associate prices within GOCDB according to instructions provided here
  • Accounting Portal to make required extraction from GOCDB and accounting for usage
    • Pull the site data and create a table for use in displaying charging. This table should be directly viewable, at least for the pilot.
    • Create test cpu view like the cloud one. Best to base it on the Custom_View so that we can select particular VOs relevant to the pilot.
  • Investigate and implement a billing function (initially a virtual bill)
  • Perform a gap analysis of supporting services (either new or extensions to the current tools) that would enable the increased automation of the process once it has been manually established and subsequent development required for missing functionality.
  • Report back on identified issues and overall progress
• Policy/Legal
  • Identify and evaluate legal, policy, and organisational issues around the full implementation of the pay-for-use model (review initial information from first survey)
  • Articulate appropriate business and responsibility models (review initial broker models developed)
  • Request potential consultation from FedSM regarding service management processes and agreements.
  • Collate information to be presented within Sustainability Plan that is easily digestible (Lead: EGI.eu)

May 2014: Pay-for-Use aspects included in Federated Cloud release (even in Beta/pre-production)

• Identify members involved in the EGI Federated Cloud to serve as pay-for-use representatives
• Gather requirements from the EGI FedCloud for its inclusion

June 2014: First presentation of activities and feedback from EGI-InSPIRE EC Review

• PoC to decide what information to be presented and ultimate goal

October 2014: Conclusion of phase 2 activities: updates from feedback and overall refinements

• TBD based on activities carried out. Dedicated F2F to be discussed either following EC review or other date TBD (e.g. Sept 2014).

December 2014: Circulation/Publication of Final Proof of Concept Report

• To be included in final EGI-InSPIRE Periodic Report (Lead: EGI.eu with requested contributions from PoC members)