What is multitenancy?
Multitenancy or software multitenancy is a software architecture in which a single instance of a software application serves multiple customers.
Software multitenancy has multiple instances of an application operating in a shared environment. It’s able to work because each tenant (aka the customer) is integrated physically but is logically separated. This means that a single instance of the software runs on one server that serves multiple tenants.
Multitenancy can be found in both public cloud and private cloud environments—enabling each tenants’ data to be separated from each other. Multitenancy is also important when scaling public and private clouds—helping make multitenancy a standard.
There are three types of multitenancy:
- Uses a single application and database instance to store data and host tenants
- Uses a single database with multiple schemas, using a single application instance with individual databases for each tenant
- Hosts data in multiple databases
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