Multitenancy planning

When planning for multitenancy, consider the following items:

  • Multitenant SDLC: A multitenant provider must establish the infrastructure and guidelines to support a multitenant software development life cycle. This effort can involve deploying and managing an instance of multitenancy in multiple environments, and working with tenants to deploy, test, and monitor applications.
  • Multitenant application architecture: A multitenant provider must establish the multitenant application architecture, which specifies the shared application (or framework) stack, and the means for tenant customization. A multitenant provider might want to control or guide tenant customizations by constructing a customized shared region, especially in situations where tenants require only minor variations of a common business process.
  • System maintenance: Maintenance activities in multitenancy affect all tenants. For example, when a system patch is applied, all tenants are affected by the patch. Upgrades and patches cannot be applied on a tenant-by-tenant basis.
  • Tenant life cycle: The number of tenants and the tenant life cycle must be understood to perform capacity planning and to manage disk and database resources.
  • Tenant security: A multitenant provider administers privileged features and tenant setup. The administrator in the tenant context is an operator that is created at tenant creation time.