Resource pooling is simply allowing multiple customers onto the same infrastructure. Each customer only needs a small fraction of the infrastructure in terms of memory, storage, and network bandwidth. Because of this, it’s much less expensive for a customer to contract with a SaaS provider to just use a small portion of their resources vs building out an entire infrastructure on their own.
Resource pooling is not a new concept at all. It’s been around for hundreds of years. How so, you may ask? The logistics industry is the most common use of resource pooling. Companies contract with freight carriers and warehouses to ship and store their goods, right next to other company’s goods. Companies don’t own their own interstate system but instead share the common interstate system to transport.
Resource pooling in the digital world is the same exact concept. Instead of transporting and storing widgets, we’re transporting and storing bytes of information. The storage, processing and network bandwidth are all shared. If more capacity or speed is needed, it is automatically provisioned.