Working with shared services

Shared services provide a predefined pattern that is deployed and shared by multiple application deployments in the cloud, including virtual applications, virtual systems, and virtual appliances.

Shared services are shipped with the product and are included in the IBM® Foundation Pattern type. Several types of shared services are offered and you can deploy them as needed. For a list of shared services offered, see Deploying shared services.

A shared service provides certain runtime services to multiple applications or services to you on behalf of multiple applications. Shared services are built on the multitenant architecture model in that a single deployment can service multiple tenants or multiple client applications. You usually find only one single reference to the shared service per cloud group, which is a physical group of hardware that defines a cloud.

You can deploy only one instance of a type of shared service in a cloud group. This shared service can be used by all application deployments in the cloud group, which means the shared service must provide multitenant access.