Pool operations

Once your pool is deployed and active, you can manage it from the Private Pools page in the portal.

Assigning MCP Servers to a Pool

1. Navigate to your MCP server in the portal
2. Select Deploy to Private Cloud
3. Choose the target pool and enter an MCP prefix (for example, crm-api)
4. The Operator picks up the change and deploys the MCP server — typically within 60 seconds
5. Your MCP server is now accessible at https://{pool-host}/{mcp-prefix}/mcp

Force Sync

If you've made configuration changes and want them applied immediately (rather than waiting for the next sync cycle), use the Force Sync action from the pool detail page. This tells the Operator to re-read its configuration and reconcile immediately.

Reseed

If a pool's configuration becomes out of sync (shown in the pool health dashboard), use the Reseed action to rebuild all configuration from the source of truth. This is a safe operation — it regenerates configuration without affecting running traffic.

Monitoring Pool Health

The Private Pools page shows the health of all pools at a glance:

• Active pools with recent heartbeats are healthy
• Unknown pools (no heartbeat in 30+ minutes) may have networking issues
• Out of sync pools have configuration drift and may need a force-sync or reseed

Cell-based isolation

A single pool often hosts workloads with very different risk profiles — a battle-tested production server sitting next to a brand-new one you're still evaluating. Cell-based isolation lets you split one pool into separate isolation tiers ("cells") so that an experimental or misbehaving server can't disrupt your production traffic. Each enabled tier runs its own Armor gateway behind a lightweight router, so a problem in one tier stays contained there.

By default a pool is single-cell — one shared Armor for everything. Turn on cell-based isolation when you want that blast-radius separation.

The three tiers

Tier	Best for	Characteristics
Critical	Production servers you depend on	Dedicated capacity, strict quotas, insulated from canaries
Standard	The general fleet — most servers	Elastic, shared capacity. The default tier
Experimental	New or in-evaluation servers (canaries)	Tight blast radius, capped resources

Standard is always on whenever isolation is enabled — it's the fallback tier. You choose whether to also run Critical, Experimental, or both.

Enabling isolation on a pool

1. Open the pool's detail page and find the Cell Isolation card.
2. Select the edit (pencil) icon.
3. Choose the tiers this pool should run (Standard is always included). For example, enable Standard + Experimental to keep canaries away from your main fleet, or all three for full separation.
4. Save. The Operator brings up a dedicated Armor for each enabled tier and routes traffic accordingly — typically within a minute or two.

A single-cell pool (no tiers selected) behaves exactly as before — one Armor for the whole pool.

Assigning a server or persona to a tier

Cell assignment lives on the pool's detail page — not the MCP-server or persona add/edit screens. From the pool's MCP servers or personas list, open a resource's Configure dialog; on a multi-cell pool it shows an Isolation cell selector listing the tiers the pool runs.

• By default a server or persona lands in Standard — the shared default tier. Move it to Experimental while you're still evaluating it (to keep it off your main fleet), or promote it to Critical once it's proven.
• The selector only offers tiers the pool actually runs, so a server can't be pinned to a tier that doesn't exist.
• Assigning a server or persona to the Critical tier is restricted to administrators.

Automating with the API? The portal keeps tier selection on the pool page to keep the day-to-day flow simple, but the API is fully capable: cell is accepted on the MCP-server and persona create/update endpoints, and cells on the pool endpoints — so scripted and CI-driven workflows can assign isolation directly.

Changing or disabling tiers

You can change a pool's enabled tiers at any time from the Cell Isolation card. If you disable a tier that still has servers or personas assigned to it, those resources automatically fall back to Standard so they keep serving traffic — nothing goes offline.

Tips

• Check pool health regularly from the Private Cloud page
• Watch for stale heartbeats — they may indicate networking issues between your cluster and the control plane
• Use force-sync after configuration changes for immediate application
• Use aigateway monitor for comprehensive real-time monitoring