Why you should use Multi-tenancy in cloud hosting

Description: If multi-tenancy is not multi-user or multi-enterprise as people used to believe, then how to define and gain benefits from using multi-tenancy in the cloud? Read on to find the answer cloud hosting adoption has become a trend in the IT world. A report by IDC reveals$17 billion out of $359 billion in this field could be spent for cloud hosting in 2019. More than half of participants in Baseline’s survey admit their use of public clouds.

Among many issues of adopting cloud hosting, how different workloads are implemented and contributed to different types of clouds raises concerns among IT managers, organizations, and end users. There are two types of cloud hosting, based on the features of workloads: public clouds and private clouds. Small-to-medium organizations or start-ups tend to use public clouds for most of the workloads. Large businesses, on the other hand, swing between the two clouds. The key is to maintain a balance of distributing workloads between public clouds and private clouds.

Besides the choice between public and private clouds, it is essential to pay attention to the architecture of the cloud, in this case, multi-tenancy. Understanding multi-tenancy and its very concepts is a vitally important step for cloud users to expand their cloud utilization.

What is Multi-tenancy

The virtual environment that a tenant requires often includes as many layers of enterprise architecture as possible. Thus, tenants are multi-users. Both departmental application to process sensitive data in private clouds and international application to work with product catalogs on public clouds have the same tenancy features and requirements, regardless of their different architecture.

Multi-tenancy is the key common attribute of both public and private clouds, and it applies to all three layers of a cloud: There are 3 layers of a cloud: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Multi-tenancy is applied in both public and privates clouds in all three layers above. It allows tenants to access and run the server instance, thus reducing the expenditure of the service users.

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When it comes to layers of a cloud. IaaS layer is often mentioned. As in both public and private clouds, it is known to encompass more than just tactical characteristics and carry out the implementation of IT-as-a-Service (ITaas). An Iaas also includes service-level-agreements (SLAs), which enhance the accountability. It strengthens security alert by using identity management. Last but not least, it features many wonderful key properties such as fault tolerance, disaster recovery and so on.

Multi-tenancy in clouds, if staying only in Iaas layer, isn’t worth to pursue further. It has to encompass PassS layer (application servers or JVM), Saas layer or even application layer where the database, workflow, and user interface are stored. Depending on the degree of multi-tenancy offered, customers or service users can enjoy the whole spectrum of services in a cloud.

Multi-tenancy and its degrees

At the highest level of multi-tenancy, it allows the sharing of the database as well as supports the transition of workflow, user interface, and business logic. The exact degree of multi-tenancy is hard to tell since it solely depends on the degree of sharing SaaS layer or the core application among tenants.

In the lowest level, multi-tenancy only includes the IaaS and PaaS layers and distributes SaaS layers to each tenant. A higher degree of multi-tenancy groups tenants that distribute database schemas and other applications. The middle degree allows each group of customers to own a customized database schema and the application.

Which multi-tenancy degree is suitable for you?

Choose multi-tenancy isn’t an easy quest since the features of the workload need to be determined, including the utilitarian of the workload against security, volatility, etc. The application of multi-tenancy is somewhat useful for the distribution of the same schema and features within shared services team. They also feature similar security process including encryption and authorization, which explains why public clouds are more attractive to easy-to-process workloads such as email, expense reporting, use training and functional testing. Users need to decide which degree of multi-tenancy they want and from which choose appropriate cloud providers.
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However, as for the workloads designed for private and community, it is the service users’ job to form a multi-tenant architecture. The job is also to evaluate different cloud service providers and establish their own IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS layers.

In other words, multi-tenancy is a crucial part of cloud hosting. While most of it still applies the concepts of mainframe computing, multi-tenancy makes an encouraging move, trying to enlarge these concepts to assist as many intra- and inter-tenants as possible. The attempt to upgrade cloud hosting service by using multi-tenancy is quite revolutionary and complex to a certain extent.