multi-tenancy

 

What is multi-tenancy?

Multi-tenancy is an architecture in which a single instance of a software application serves multiple customers. Each customer is called a tenant. Tenants can be given the ability to customize some parts of the application, such as the color of the user interface or business rules, but they can't customize the application's code.

In a multi-tenant architecture, multiple instances of an application operate in a shared environment. This architecture is able to work because each tenant is integrated physically but is logically separated. This means that a single instance of the software will run on one server and then serve multiple tenants. In this way, a software application in a multi-tenant architecture can share a dedicated instance of configurations, data, user management and other properties.

Multi-tenancy applications can share the same users, displays, rules and database schemas. Users can customize the rules to an extent and the database schemas.

Importance of multi-tenancy

Multi-tenancy is an old idea and traces its roots to classical mainframe architectures where many apps and users shared a common computing hardware platform. With the reintroduction and broad adoption of modern hardware-assisted virtualization, the ability to share hardware among multiple software instances -- such as virtual machines (VMs) and their applications -- placed a new emphasis on multi-tenancy capabilities. The technique gained popularity across local data centers and within hosted infrastructures normally associated with colocation and other shared IT services -- all enabling many users to share limited or common hardware infrastructure.