Offerings and Application Service Prescribed Relationships

[Bartosz Socha]

I have a problem with how prescribed relationships are defined to describe dependency between Service Offerings and Application Services. 

Let's consider two scenarios:

1. My company is a Managed Service Provider, it has several data centers and other companies use our hosting services to deploy and maintain virtual infrastructure. 

1. I'll have a Business Service "Virtual Machine Management (since the service we provide is THE business we run) Virtual Machine Management 
2. I'll have a number of Service Offerings where I stratify our BS into options
3. I'll have a Business Application which consists of two Application Stacks (one for prod, one for non-prod as we have 2 vCenter Servers)
4. I'll connect my Service Offerings to the Application Stacks with a Depends on::Used by relationships to show that I'm using vCenters as tools to manage virtual infra

2. My company runs a web store.

1. I'll have a Technical Service "Virtual Machine Management (since the service we provide is published to service owners and underpins another Business Service "I sell stuff through Web Store", application owners can request to provision and provision infra).
2. I'll have a number of Service Offerings where I stratify our Technical Service into options
3. I'll have a Business Application which consists of two Application Stacks (one for prod, one for non-prod as we have 2 vCenter Servers)
4. How do I show dependency of providing a technical service offering on an application service/ stack which is used as a tool for my offering's activities? The prescribed relationship between technical service offering and application service is "Contains::Contained by" but aren't this supposed to be used to determine which infra/stacks are in the scope of activities? 

Dear CSDM community, experts and whisperers: Do I have your blessing to use "Depends on:: Used by" relationship type to show a dependency of a technical service offering on an application stack which is used to deliver that offering? 

[Bartosz Socha]

What if delivery of a TSO ("We deploy VMs") is dependent on a tool (vCenter server and the rest of a stack)? 

[Bartosz Socha]

How do you show that delivering a TSO has a dependency on a set of tools then? If I have an Offering to build a VM effectively infra admin will log in to vCenter server and spawn a VM there. If vCenter server is down that technical offering cannot be delivered. Thats a dependency of TSO on an Application Service (which vCenter server is part of). 

[Mark Bodman]

In this example, the vCenter is an instance of a Business Application (Application Service) which provides that Technical Service and Offering of "managing lifecycle of virtual compute" or something like this.  While this is a Technical Service only, you can still show the offering dependancies on the vCenter instance on the dependency between offerings.

By the way, this may be mirrored in an api call for example, which would show how the offering dependency may be implemented.  Ideallty, the Technical Service would be placed in a self-service catalog, no different than how you manage ServiceNow instances in HI.