Multitenancy includes multiple tenants. This refers to a group of users, resources, or services. The multitenant application design was created to enable multiple users to access the same logic simultaneously.
It ensures that tenants do not have access to data and configuration information that is not their own. In multitenancy, a physical or virtual server hosts an application that is designed to allow usage by multiple different users. An example of multitenancy is software that is shared by several consumers, where each consumer is unaware of the others.
A Software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider can run multiple instances of the application and provide web access to multiple customers with customized configurations for different client bases. Such a scenario allows data isolation as each tenant’s data remains invisible to others.
The term software multitenancy refers to a software architecture in which a single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants. It’s a type of cloud computing architecture in which one or more logical instances are created and executed on top of the primary software. In terms of multitenancy using the cloud, it has now been broadened with different service models, taking advantage of virtualization and remote access. Multitenancy in cloud computing reduces the initial set-up cost as it functions on the pay-per-use policy.
Multitenancy has the following characteristics:
Multi-tenancy is sometimes mistaken for virtualization because they are similar. However, in multitenancy, physical or virtual server hosting is enabled and the application is designed to allow usage by multiple users. The application appears to be exclusive for each user. Whereas in virtualization, multiple virtual copies of the server environment can be hosted by a single physical server.