Consumers

A consumer is a unit within the representation of an organizational structure. The structure creates the association between the workload demand and the resource supply.

Consumer structure

The consumer structure is hierarchical, and represents some logical, organizational structure. The consumer structure may mirror the organizational structure of a business unit, where each consumer represents a department. The consumer structure can represent any type of organization, provided that the structure represents the organizations that want to access compute resources.

A consumer can be an individual user, a project, a department, or an entire company.

A consumer can be divided into lower-level consumers, which may also be subdivided. The lowest-level consumer is the level at which an application is associated.

In the above example, both Dept-1 and Team-1 are consumers. Team-1 is a child consumer of Dept-1. However, Team-1 is a leaf consumer—the lowest level consumer in its hierarchy.

A consumer is identified by a string that represents a path in the hierarchy. Each element of the path represents a consumer. The administrator at each level in the consumer hierarchy can define its child consumers, and the policies that determine how the consumer’s resources are shared between the child consumers.