Multitenancy Part 3

 

This is a continuation of a series of articles on Microsoft Azure from an operational point of view that surveys the different services from the service portfolio of the Azure public cloud. The most recent article discussed architecting multitenant applications on Azure. This continues to discuss tenant model and lifecycle.

 

The choice of tenancy models is very important to designing the multi-tenant architecture. There are primarily two models - the business-to-business model and the business-to-consumer model. The former requires tenant isolation for organizations, divisions, teams, and departments while the latter is about individual consumers. The business-to-consumer model must respect privacy and security for the data and the business-to-business model must respect regulatory compliance.

 

Tenants can be distinguished between logical and physical tenants. When the scale of tenants increases, one of the relieving measures taken is to replicate the solution or some of its components to meet the increased demand. The load from one single instance may then be spilled over to another or the traffic can be mapped to infrastructure based on certain criteria.  In a B2C model, each user can be a separate logical tenant. They can be mapped to different physical tenants using different deployed instances. This results in a one-many mapping between logical and physical tenants. When compared to the B2B model, the definition of the logical tenant becomes clearer. In a B2B model, the resources for a firm are isolated from the start. In this case, the logical and the physical tenants mean the same.

 

One of the key differences between logical and physical tenant is how the isolation is enforced. When multiple logical tenants share a single set of infrastructure, it relies on application code and a tenant identifier in the database to keep each tenant’s data separate. Physical tenants have their own infrastructure so code running on them find it less important to be aware that this is a multi-tenant environment. Physical tenants are also referred to as deployments, supertenants, or stamps.

 

Tenant isolation can run deep. For example, having a single set of shared infrastructure, with separate instances of the application and separate databases for each tenant or sharing some common resources while keeping other resources separate for each tenant or keeping data on a separate physical infrastructure. Separate resources for each tenant is a practice for public cloud as well and often translates to separate physical infrastructure using dedicated hosts.

 

The tenant lifecycle depends on the tenant. Solutions that are software-as-a-service may want to honor customer requests for trials with a trial tenant. Questions about rigor for trial data, infrastructure for trial tenants, purchase option after trials and limits imposed on trial tenants must be answered. Regular tenants can be onboarded as the first step of their lifecycle which involves routines for allocation and initialization that could also be automated, setting up protection of data, meeting compliance standards, preparing for disaster recovery and setting up pricing options and billing models. If the customers require a pre-production environment, onboarding might be different since expectations around availability might be relaxed.

 

Reference to multitenancy: https://1drv.ms/w/s!Ashlm-Nw-wnWhLMfc6pdJbQZ6XiPWA?e=aWj2Z0