A service pool is a group of resources that form an infrastructure or technology layer (tier) within an application or a business service. The example of such resources is all the virtual machines that are used for the database functions. The service pool resources contribute to the same part of the workload and hence they are sized together. This aggregated sizing for service pools helps you to more precisely plan and manage your capacity needs. 

Service pools consume the services from providers. For instance, virtual machines consume the services that are provided by hosts. In this case, a host is a provider and a virtual machine is a consumer. 

For cloud and on-premises, you can configure your systems to add one more layer in the service model called service pools. You need to explicitly create the service pools.

Deployments in Kubernetes are conceptually similar to service pools; therefore, deployments are used in the service model and view as is. You need not create service pools for Kubernetes as deployments are directly available when you import the Kubernetes data.

Role of service pools in the capacity analysis

When you analyze the capacity at the service pool level, you can size your infrastructure more accurately and precisely. The image shows the example of the Online Shopping Portal business service and hierarchy of business service, applications, service pools, and deployments.

In the Online Shopping Portal example, to meet future demand, you might make incorrect capacity-related change, such as increasing servers for database, when you really need more servers for web. With service pools, you can easily and accurately identify the area where additional resources are required based on usage or risk indicators for these service pools.

Example hierarchy of business service, applications, service pools,
and deployments for the Online Shopping Portal business service