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We expect the solution architect to consider the characteristics of each strategy and choose what suits best. For example, if you run on a container platform, the first solution may be more feasible, while when you run on VMs, the second strategy may be easier. Aspects that you may want to consider are operating costs, maintainability, data separation, availability, elasticity, flexibility and scalability.

Why use multi-tenancy?

When you want to offer a SaaS service to multiple companies, you need a multi-tenant setup.

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• Resource sharing: you can be more cost efficient by sharing resources between tenants
• Performing a runtime upgrade needs to be done only once to have effect on all tenants
• Publishing a new version for a model only needs to be done once to have effect on all tenants
• Build once, sell multiple times

What do you need to have in place when using multi-tenancy?

Scaling strategy and availability

When having a multi-tenant service, the tenants will demand the service to be available, according to the SLA that was agreed on in the contract. This means that when your service becomes more popular, or when it has peak usage windows, it will require more processing power. Hence, you need to be able to scale your system to fit the service's demands

Tenant onboarding

When a new tenant will use your service, you will need a procedure that describes what needs to be done to add that tenant.

Service contracts

In a multi-tenancy setup, all models are shared between all tenants. However, it is possible to define different endpoints for external Rest/Soap service calls. It is important to know that those service calls can be routed to different URLs, but that they cannot differ in message structure (contract).

When not to use multi-tenancy?

When your service differs in a substantial way for each tenant, multi-tenancy might not be suitable for your solution: more diversity between tenants leads to higher costs in development and maintenance.

In Blueriq terms, if you need to make exceptions based on tenant in your model, or if you need a different model for each tenant, we strongly advise against using multi-tenancy.

System requirements

Generally, a multi-tenant system can accommodate the same amount of simultaneous users as the same system that is single tenant.

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