Multitenancy

Software multitenancy is a software architecture in which a single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants. Systems designed in such manner are "shared" (rather than "dedicated" or "isolated"). A tenant is a group of users who share a common access with specific privileges to the software instance. With a multitenant architecture, a software application is designed to provide every tenant a dedicated share of the instance—including its data, configuration, user management, tenant individual functionality and non-functional properties. Multitenancy contrasts with multi-instance architectures, where separate software instances operate on behalf of different tenants.[1]

Some commentators regard multitenancy as an important feature of cloud computing.[2][3]

  1. ^ Krebs, Rouven (2012). "Architectural Concerns in Multi-tenant SaaS Applications" (PDF). Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2012). Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science. SciTePress. Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 February 2015. Retrieved 21 February 2015.
  2. ^ Wainewright, Phil (30 October 2010). "Defining the true meaning of cloud". ZDNet. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 17 March 2016. Multi-tenancy. Sharing a single, pooled, operational instance of the entire top-to-bottom infrastructure is more than simply a vendor convenience; it's the only way to really achieve cloud scale.
  3. ^ Wilder, Bill (2012). Cloud Architecture Patterns: Using Microsoft amit. O'Reilly Media, Inc. p. 78. ISBN 9781449357993. In the cloud, multitenant services are standard: data services, DNS services, hardware for virtual machines, load balancers, identity management, and so forth.