While architecting an enterprise system, separation of concerns is a commonly used design principle used to maintainability of the system. This leads to isolation of workloads as separate work packages (computational units) which are then deployed on hosting surrogates like web sites, virtual machines, containers, and so on, Often, this principle of isolation extends to the physical hosting infrastructure which may cause work packages to be deployed on separate virtual machines. Although this approach simplified the logical architecture it also causes underutilization of hardware resources there by increasing the operational and hosting cost.

The following diagram illustrates poorly utilized resources for a set of services: