Application layering in multitenancy

Multitenancy is designed to work with any Pega product and Industry Application, just like a standard (non-multitenant) system. After multitenancy is installed, additional products and Industry Applications can be deployed to create a logical layering as shown in the following figure. These products and Industry Applications are installed by the multitenant provider, and become the shared building blocks for all tenants on the system. Additionally, a multitenant provider can choose to build an application layer that contains the base application that will be customized per tenant.

The tenant region represents tenant-customized content. The level of customization can vary by tenant or by application, ranging from a customized login screen that displays a tenant’s company logo to a highly customized business process that is integrated into other customer systems and processes.

An important application design consideration is determining the division of rules and data classes between the shared and tenant regions. For optimal scalability and query performance, minimize the number of custom rules (or data classes) in a tenant, reusing as much of the shared region logic and processes as feasible.

Conceptually, shared and tenant regions are the same except for a few restrictions on administrative operations. The roles and capabilities of the administrative users in the shared and tenant regions are the same, however, their views of Pega Platform differ. Features that can affect an entire system are disabled in Dev Studio for tenant regions.