Introduction:-
In today's cloud-driven world, businesses and developers are constantly looking for scalable, cost-effective, and efficient ways to deliver software solutions. One of the most popular approaches is multi-tenancy, a software architecture where a single application serves multiple customers/clients (tenants) while ensuring data isolation and security. Multi-tenancy is particularly critical for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, enabling organizations to optimize resources, reduce costs, and streamline operations.
What Is Multi-Tenancy?
Multi-tenancy is an architectural pattern where a single instance of a software application serves multiple customers, known as tenants. Each tenant can have its own data, configurations, and access controls, but all share the same underlying infrastructure and application code.
Levels of Multi-Tenancy
Multi-tenant architecture can be implemented in various ways. So lets first understand how it was done in a non multi-tenant environment
There is a separate database for each tenant and the database configuration is done at application level and hence we have dedicated application deployed for each tenant.
To avoid maintaining an application server for each tenant we have 3 ways of implementing multi-tenancy.
Database-Level Multi-Tenancy: Each tenant has its own separate database, providing high isolation but increasing infrastructure costs.
Shared Database and Separate Schema /Schema per tenant:-
In this approach, each tenant’s data is kept in a distinct schema on a shared database.
Shared Database and Shared Schema
all tenants share a database, and every table has a column with the tenant identifier:
