Preface – This post is part of the Cloud Computing series.

Introduction

Multi-tenancy is a cloud architecture where multiple clients can work on a single computer and use the resources. Each client here is referred to as a tenant. Software as a service is an example of multitenant architecture. All the clients work in a shared environment. Each tenant’s data is remote and remains invisible to other tenants.

Multi-tenancy works opposite that of single tenancy. In a single tenancy, there is one single end-user. In multitenant, as the end-user is working on shared resources, the data is secured from other tenants.

Single Tenant

A single-tenant architecture is the opposite of Multitenant architecture. Single tenancy refers to serving one customer only with the resources and infrastructure they need. Each customer tends to have a separate, independent database or software instance.

Architecture of Multi-tenancy

Multi-tenancy is used in cloud computing to offer share tenancy among public providers like Google Cloud, Amazon web services, and Oracle. The multi-tenancy approach is to provide an Identical runtime environment for multiple tenants, with one resource container for each tenant.

The architecture of Multi-tenancy is designed in different models:

Database per-tenant

Each tenant gets a new database. The app tiers are highly scalable, either vertically or horizontally. The database, which refers to the same resource groups, is isolated from other tenants into elastic pools. Vendors can move tenant databases between sites to optimize resource management.

Cross Databases

You can move your data with other tenants or between the group of tenants. Cross-database works best when you have several recognized tenant groups with contrasting resource needs (premium subscribers and free trial users).

Benefits of Multi-tenancy

1. Hosting time reduced

It takes significantly less time at the time of deployment of software because of the multi-tenancy feature. It also does not require management and thus saves our expenses and time.

2. Convenient enrolling of new tenants

In a Multitenant Architecture, the signing up and configuring of subdomain/domain are automated. Thus, it is convenient to enroll the new tenants. Multi tenants highly support Artificial Intelligence(AI) and automation, So it becomes easy to add and delete tenants(Tenants are the group of people who share common access).

3. High assurance and privacy

Multi-tenancy is good at threat detection and keeping other tenants isolated from one another. These avoid data leakage and other data conflicts.

4. Scalable

Scalability is an essential feature of cloud computing. It provides adding and removing resources to our needs, and we have to pay only for the resources we use.

There is no upfront cost for resources also. Thus multitenant also supports scalability and load balancing. This feature is perfect for an enterprise that is growing fast but unpredictably.

5. Better use of resources

One machine reserved for one tenant isn’t efficient, as that one tenant is not likely to use all of the machine’s computing power. Sharing devices among multiple tenants maximize the use of available resources.

Who uses Multi-tenant Architecture?

Software as a service (SAAS) are offerings of Multitenancy. SAAS has many products, such as Salesforce, ClickUp, Atlassian, Hubspot CRM, etc. support Multi-tenancy architecture. The trader uses the same server and space to serve multiple user accounts. AWS also uses multitenant architecture where customers have different Amazon accounts and the same machine processes information.