Multi-tenancy in the cloud

Multi-tenant model

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the delivery of IT services including servers, storage, databases, networks, software, analytics and intelligence over the Internet (“the cloud”) to deliver faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. Typically, you only pay for the cloud services you use, which helps you reduce operating costs, manage your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale according to the needs of your business.

What is a multi-tenant cloud?

A multi-tenant cloud is a cloud computing architecture that allows customers to share computing resources in a public or private cloud. Each tenant’s data is isolated and invisible to other tenants.

Each section of a multi-tenant cloud network contains complex permissions to allow each user to access only their own stored information and the security of other cloud tenants. Within the cloud infrastructure, data from each tenant is inaccessible to all other tenants and only accessible with permission from the cloud provider.

In a private cloud, customers or tenants can be different individuals or groups within the same company, while in a public cloud completely different organizations can securely share their server space. Most public cloud providers use the shared model. This allows them to run servers with a few instances, which is less expensive and simplifies upgrades.

Advantages of Multi-tenant models

1. Lower costs: Because the software provider can serve multiple tenants in a single instance of application and support infrastructure (and because tenants share the burden of maintaining software, infrastructure, and data centre operations), ongoing costs are usually lower than a single tenant agreement. SaaS software is usually offered at a predictable monthly or annual subscription price, based on the number of users, usage level, or volumes of data managed in the application.
2. Scalability: Tenants can scale on demand new users can access the same instance of the software, usually with a step-by-step increase in the subscription fee.
3. Code-free customization: SaaS multi-tenant offerings are highly configurable, so that each tenant client can adapt the application to meet their specific business objectives, without costly, time-consuming and sometimes risky custom development.
4. Continuous and consistent updates and maintenance: The multi-tenant software provider is responsible for updates and fixes. New features and / or fixes are made without any effort on the part of the customer and only once (as opposed to the architecture of a single tenant, where providers must update all copies of the software).
5. Higher productivity for tenants: Because they do not have to manage infrastructure or software, tenants can focus on more important tasks.

Uses of multi-tenancy in companies

Shared structures are often used in cloud computing to provide colocation to public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. In addition, multiplicity is an important component of other cloud models, as well as software service, and is used by many SASS companies and almost all cloud companies.

Example

Multi-tenant clouds can be compared to the structure of an apartment building. Each resident has access to their own apartment as part of the entire construction contract and only authorized persons can enter certain units. However, the entire building shares resources such as water, electricity and common areas.

This is similar to a multi-tenant cloud where the provider sets quotas, rules, and overall performance expectations for customers, but each individual customer has private access to their information.

Limitations of multi-tenancy

1. Security risks and possible compliance issues: Some companies may not be able to store data on shared infrastructure, however secure, due to regulatory requirements. Additionally, security issues or corrupted data from one tenant can spread to other tenants on the same machine, although this is very rare and should not happen if the cloud provider has properly configured their infrastructure. . This security risk is mitigated somewhat by the fact that cloud providers can generally invest more in their security than individual companies.
2. Noisy neighbour effect: If a tenant uses excessive computing power, it can degrade the performance of other tenants. Again, this shouldn’t happen if the cloud provider has properly configured their infrastructure.

Single tenant v/s Multi tenant

In a single cloud tenant, only one client is hosted on the server and has access to it. Due to the multi-tenancy architecture that hosts multiple clients on the same server, it is important to fully understand the security and performance offered by the provider. A single-tenant cloud gives customers greater control over data, storage, security, and performance management.

The main benefit of using the shared shared cloud model is cost savings. With a solution like IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions Shared (IC4V Shared), IT teams can extend their VMs to the cloud with all the flexibility and scalability they need. In doing so, they can choose an on-demand or confidential pricing model, where they only pay for what is consumed.

Another advantage of the multi-tenant cloud model is that migrations are quick and easy. IT can start moving VMware virtual machines to the cloud in minutes using a self-service console that makes it easy to increase or decrease capacity to maximize profitability. With a consumption-based cloud model, many IT teams find the multi-tenant model particularly effective for setting up disaster recovery sites or delivering cloud resources to DevOps and software development teams on the go.

Securing Multi-Tenant Environment

Micro segmentation: an efficient solution:
To achieve micro segmentation in a multi-tenancy scenario, your solution must be easy to implement and use and provide the following:

1. Real-time visibility of all environments and workloads and traffic in between.
2. Allows you to create consistent and reusable policies, regardless of IP construction and network infrastructure.
3. Quickly validate real-time traffic strategies, then implement them
   DevOps is secure with workload security from birth.
4. Continuous traffic monitoring and automatic policy correction.
5. Be alert and automatically correct any deviations from company policy.
6. Implement policies that are transparent and consistent in hybrid environments, such as AWS, Azure, VMware, and GCP.

Conclusion

The adoption has gone a step beyond corporate casual intellectual activity and experimentation. An analysis by IDC shows that $ 17 billion to $ 359 billion in global IT spending in 2009 can be attributed to cloud computing. When they said, two-thirds of the magazine looked around at baseline to expand the use of the clouds of a Council of State. Besides the distribution of the workload, architectural considerations are also essential. Multi-tenancy is the type of architectural consideration and understanding of the critical first step of a multi-tenancy, which is the broadest adoption of the cloud. It seems that the first stretch in the public clouds — where workers can end up with a farmer — messed up “multi-farm” as a synonym for “multi-company.” However, different concepts. Even the granularity of an application holds to a not so stable degree. Individual user intact.