Multi-tenant architecture has seen widespread adoption in cloud computing. Before the dawn of the cloud, most of the businesses used single-tenant arc

Introduction to Multi-tenant architecture

submited by

Style Pass

2021-08-16 04:30:04

Multi-tenant architecture has seen widespread adoption in cloud computing. Before the dawn of the cloud, most of the businesses used single-tenant architecture. This pattern didn’t scale well and added to Software provider’s maintenance costs.

In this newsletter, I’ll discuss the actual meaning of multi-tenant architecture, it’s benefits, & a real-world analogy. We will explore how multi-tenant won over the single-tenant architecture in the cloud environment.

Let’s assume that we are in the early 2000s when the cloud was in its infancy. Let’s say you are developing a B2B software to manage payroll of different companies. What do you think you would need to start the business & provide solutions to your customers?

You would need three important things - compute, storage and network to run your software. For running your application, an on-premise server would be needed. You would purchase a secondary storage device to store customer’s data. And a computer network using which the customers would communicate with application servers.

Every customer would have its computer managing the application and data. Customer’s application and data would be isolated from each other. In a nutshell, this is how the single-tenant system worked.