Cascading among Multiple Organizations, Multiple Data Centers and Multiple Users, a cloud environment that can leverage your business to its optimal value.
Multi-tenant architecture is an important aspect of cloud computing understanding which can help clients understand their exact requirement and vendors realize the optimal solutions. But first, let’s take a short recap of what is Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing…

It is an IT model where a service provider provides computing resources including storage, services, applications and networks to clients. In a cloud, these resources grow intelligence and can be rapidly scaled depending on your need and de-scaled when not needed.

Cloud computing basically involves Public, Private and the new Hybrid clouds. Simply speaking, a public cloud is where you share the cloud architecture with others and a private cloud is where all the architecture is owned by you. In a hybrid cloud, you can use the services of both public and private cloud environments to create value for your company.

Multi-tenancy is one such value. It means that a service model serves multiple clients, called tenants or tenants. These tenants are not really individual users, but business software customers. A multi-tenant is an essential architecture for a cloud environment because it allows multiple tenants (business customers) to share the same physical resources as an ERP application, but remain logically isolated. There are various models of multi-tenancy which include

1.  In model 1, the business customer is isolated with his own stack of technology and no sharing of resources. Practically, even while the customer feels like that he is existing in a multi-tenant environment, it essentially means that the application is being offered to multiple clients from the same DC and thus, this model is not really a multi-tenant one. This model is alike the conventional model of hosting where individual users have their own stack of resources and application. This model lacks flexibility and elasticity, because adding a new tenant means provisioning new instances of hardware and software and thus, doesn’t offer economies of scale.
2.  Multi-tenancy via hardware virtualization. In this model, multiple tenants have their own technology stack, but the hardware is allocated dynamically from a pool of resources via virtualization engines. It is similar to the previous model, but allows elasticity of the hardware layer. Since this model does not require redesigning the application, it helps application and infrastructure providers to enter the cloud faster.
3. Multi-tenancy via container. In this model, multiple tenants operate in the same instance of application server (container), but is linked with a separate instance of the software database. This means that the execution environment is shared among multiple tenants, but the data is on the same platform. Thus, the isolation of the database makes sure that client’s data stays safe and the container implementation means there is more elasticity and can be easily customized.
4. The last model has been evolved in this model where the software stack is also shared.

ESDS’ new eNlight cloud platform offers sophisticated multi-tenancy to client at company, departmental and user level. The platform also gives fully-compliant-by-policies enforcement, segmentation, isolation, governance, service levels and chargeback billing models for various client communities.

Multiple customers from the same organization but separate business units can use different cloud service offerings but still share the infrastructure. This feature of becomes critical to help eliminate the concern of using shared infrastructures between organizations or customers with sensitive data. All customers want to ensure that, although from a physical perspective, they are sharing the same infrastructure, from a logical perspective they are isolated without risk to their workloads. These capabilities can be enabled at the infrastructure, database or application level.

Cloud deployment models place different importance on multi-tenancy. In case of private clouds too, a single organization may have a plethora of operations wanting a high degree of logical separation between business units. Thus, multi-tenancy concerns must always be considered when looking at cloud solutions. In eNlight, many of these issues are addressed by allowing customers to create their own business unit, departments and users for VM lifecycle management on cloud. Clients can also have a segmented VPN or private VLAN to segment their workload. This ensures that their work is completely isolated from the work of other users working on the same platform. This allows client to build robust cloud environments that have the characteristics of multi-tenancy.

Clients can create VMs from allocated resource quota and further sub-divide the resource quota among departments and users. Providing complete trasperancy and flexbity to cloud users, this platform enables them to control VM life cycle managemet such as create, delete, start, stop their own VM from allocated resource quota. The cloud can be easily adopted In any organisational hirerarchy due to its unique multi-teanant cloud management portal.

Clients can also receive reports such as userwise allocated resources, used resources, opertional and non-operations VMs, etc. which can help the organisation optimize its cloud usage and achive maximum productivity.
A team also works tirelessly to patch any vulnerabilties you might face allowing you to enjoy a near 99 per cent uptiume.

Is Multi-tenancy for you?

If we are talking about the above mention eNlight Cloud Platform’s multi-tenant architecture, then YES, it is for you! It is for everyone looking for a highly-scalable and easily-manageable cloud service. The whole cloud solution delivered on a multi-tenant architecture is greatly flexible and thus more handy and easy to work on. It provides higher reliability because of it is a single point of delivery to all its customers and is also more secure due to its isolation policy and since it serves as a common platform for risk for multiple clients. It is good if you want lower upfront costs. Some flexibility is also lost since you don’t get a customized application with your own dedicated environment (that virtualization offers) – but at the end of the day it is about balancing many variables like the costs, the benefits you are getting, and the risk your business can tolerate.