In this episode of Continuous Delivery Office Hours, Tony Kelly, Bob Walker, and Steve Fenton discuss modern multi-tenancy and how different it is today than during the SaaS revolution.
Multi-tenancy has a single purpose; sharing resources between users to get higher utilization from physical infrastructure by sharing it. Originally that meant time sharing on a single computer when it was too expensive to put one on every desk (and in every pocket). When SaaS gained traction, it often meant designing a single application to handle the workloads and data for many tenants, which might be entirely different companies.
Modern multi-tenancy leans into the lightweight containerization options available today, where the sharing can be handled at the infrastructure level and applications no longer need complex architectures to manage multiple tenants. This reduces the amount of compromise surfacing through the application's design and eliminates many of the scaling challenges.
Listen to find out more about:
- Different application architectures for multi-tenancy
- The goals and own-goals caused by multi-tenanted architecture
- Real-world stories of multi-tenancy for large-scale applications