Resource Pooling

How can IT resources be organized to support dynamic sharing?

Problem

When sharing identical IT resources for scalability purposes, it can be error-prone and burdensome to keep them fully synchronized on an on-going basis.

Solution

An automated synchronization system is provided to group identical IT resources into pools and to maintain their synchronicity.

Application

Resource pools can be created at different sizes and further organized into hierarchies to provide parent and child pools.

Mechanisms

Audit Monitor, Cloud Storage Device, Cloud Usage Monitor, Hypervisor, Logical Network Perimeter, Pay-Per-Use Monitor, Remote Administration System, Resource Management System, Resource Replication, Virtual CPU, Virtual Infrastructure Manager, Virtual RAM, Virtual Server

Compound Patterns

Burst In, Burst Out to Private Cloud, Burst Out to Public Cloud, Cloud Authentication, Cloud Balancing, Elastic Environment, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Isolated Trust Boundary, Multitenant Environment, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Resilient Environment, Resource Workload Management, Secure Burst Out to Private Cloud/Public Cloud, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

A sample resource pool comprised of four sub-pools of CPUs, memory, cloud storage devices, and virtual network devices.

Pools B and C are sibling pools taken from the larger Pool A that has been allocated to a cloud consumer. This is an alternative to taking the IT resources for Pool B and Pool C from a general reserve of IT resources that is shared throughout the cloud.

Nested Pools A.1 and Pool A.2 are comprised of the same IT resources as Pool A, but in different quantities. Nested pools are generally used to provision cloud services that are rapidly instantiated using the same kind of IT resources with the same configuration settings.

NIST Reference Architecture Mapping

This pattern relates to the highlighted parts of the NIST reference architecture, as follows: