Multitenant system deployment planning

The following considerations are applicable when planning for a multitenant-enabled system.

Number of tenants and tenant load profile – The number of tenants and tenant load profile influence two key areas: the infrastructure architecture, such as the number of JVMs required to host all tenants, and the operations or system maintenance plan, which will need to accommodate increasing support demands from the tenant base as more and more tenants are added.
Tenant customization requirements – The multitenant provider builds the “shared” stack with a design that facilitates tenant customizations. In cases where tenants can make their own modifications, the multitenant provider is responsible for any effect that tenant modifications might have on the system.
Note: To maximize performance, minimize the number of customized rules and data classes in the tenant region.
Centralized management requirements – The number of tenants created and the tenant life cycle will drive the need for a self-service application or manual use of tenant management SOAP calls.
System utilization and monitoring – Before deploying a multitenant system, the multitenant provider determines how the system will be monitored. Monitoring is particularly important on a multitenant system because system resources (CPU, memory, disk) are shared and not allocated by the tenant.
Maintenance and communication plan – With multitenancy, some system management and maintenance activities will affect all tenants, in particular upgrades and hotfixes. The multitenant provider ensures that such activities are communicated to all tenants in advance.