Introducing the consumer

To understand how Symphony supplies resources to meet workload requests, consider this analogy: A bank customer does not withdraw funds directly from the bank vaults—the customer accesses an account, and requests a withdrawal from that account. The bank recognizes the customer by the account number, and determines whether the customer has sufficient funds to make a withdrawal. See Figure 1.

As shown in Figure 2, when a Symphony application requires resources, it does not communicate directly with EGO, and has no direct access to resources. The application is associated with a consumer, and requests resources through it. EGO recognizes the consumer, and through it, allocates resources to the application.