Multi‑Tenant

Multi-Tenant: Shared Infrastructure with Logical Isolation

Overview

Multi-tenancy refers to a cloud or software architecture where a single instance of an application (and its infrastructure) serves multiple customers or organizations (tenants) simultaneously. Each tenant shares the same underlying resources (compute, storage, etc.), but logically operates in isolation. In practical terms, SaaS providers use multi-tenant designs so that one copy of the software and database can handle thousands of customer accounts. In a multi-tenant system “a single instance of a software application (and its underlying database and hardware) serves multiple tenants (or user accounts).” Each tenant – often a customer organization – has its own users and data that are isolated and invisible to others. Multi-tenancy is the foundation of most cloud SaaS offerings: when you log in to a service like Salesforce or HubSpot, you’re a tenant on their multi-tenant platform.

Key aspects of multi-tenancy

Shared infrastructure: One application instance and server resources are shared, which lowers costs. Logical isolation: Although resources are shared, each tenant’s data is kept separate. Centralized updates: Since all tenants use the same codebase, the provider can apply patches or new features once for everyone, instead of updating individual installations. Scalability: The platform can add new tenants easily without provisioning new servers each time. It typically supports many tenants with a common set of resources.