What is the Single Tenant vs Multi Tenant Debate? 

Picture this: you’re a fresh grad and FINALLY getting your first big apartment! The question is, do you want roommates, or to live solo? There are pros and cons to both approaches, sure having a roommate will be fun and rent will be cheaper BUT your snacks may go missing from time to time. This same ideology can be applied to your application and database infrastructure, prompting the single tenant vs multi tenant debate. 

Like living solo vs having roommates, the single tenant vs multi tenant architecture debate describes housing your app infrastructure within different server scenarios. As the names suggest, single tenant describes server hosting dedicated to only your services and applications while multi tenancy hosts multiple apps within a shared infrastructure. 

Whether an isolated approach or a shared one is best is wholly up to the user and their individual application, but here are some reasons to choose one over the other.

The Single Tenant Approach - Isolation, at a Cost

As mentioned above, a single tenant approach sees a single instance of software allocated to a single tenant, baked in with dedicated infrastructure, databases, network, and more. Although the name suggests complete isolation, that’s actually not the case! Hosting providers provide and assist in managing dedicated infrastructure instances, with tenants being responsible for software and infrastructure customizing. 

Single Tenant Benefits

Much like how living alone can be freeing, the single tenant infrastructure approach is one that encourages flexibility and customization, creating a hosting experience that is unique to the user. Benefits for being the only tenant on a server include:

• Strong Customization: tenants decide both the hardware and software intricacies, making their infrastructure uniquely theirs
• Enhanced Data Security - isolated data minimizes data vulnerabilities, with tenants being able to create complex security measures on their own infrastructure such as confidentiality, backups, and more
• Dependability - single tenancy allocates all compute and hardware resources to a single user, increasing availability, performance, and overall flexibility 
• Portability - data migration within a single tenant architecture is easily achievable, with less data in general needed to transfer
• Data Clarity - data isolation lets the tenant’s datasets be the only ones that matter and exist in current infrastructure

Users looking towards the single tenant approach often cite enhanced security and customization as the main drivers in hosting. It’s important to note that many of the pros of single tenancy come as a result of specific user configurations to software and hardware, truly giving creative power to the users.

Single Tenant Disadvantages

On the other side of powerful benefits such as security and flexibility come disadvantages associated with being the only tenant in a server. Such disadvantages include:

• Increased Costs - much like renting your own apartment, being the only tenant in a server will ring higher database and compute costs
• Decreased Scalability - single tenant environments may be difficult to scale because of inefficient resource usage
• Complex Maintenance - in order to keep things running smoothly, regular maintenance is needing, often requiring expert support

Despite security and customization, single tenancy rings in a higher cost and more maintenance requirements, though in what uses would this trade off be logical?

Single Tenant Architecture Use Cases

Having your own infrastructure and database for a particular software instance is very powerful. For those willing to pay the high fees associated, the single tenant architecture has been shown to provide strong data protection, increased performance, and high availability.

Strong contenders for a single tenant architecture would be industries that require strong data privacy and security, safeguarding confidential information and customer data alike. Industries such as healthcare, finance, government entities, and defense sectors benefit greatly from the single tenant approach, especially from the ability to increase security parameters at will.

In addition, applications and services that need high performance and around-the-clock availability depend on being the only tenant. Apps and services like banking applications, ecommerce platforms, financial systems, cloud storage, and more rely on single tenancy.

Custom solutions and applications that thrive on strong customization and environment control also benefit greatly from being a single tenant. 

The Multi Tenant Approach - Simplifying Infrastructure

While single tenancy touts isolation and dedicated environments, multi tenant environments are quite the opposite.

The multi-tenant approach sees a single software instance, infrastructure, database, and more that serves multiple customers. In a physical sense, all customers exist on the same plane, with tenants also virtually sharing databases. This shared aspect isn’t detrimental to tenants, however, with users still being able to customize their databases and even scale.

Multi Tenant Benefits

Much like sharing an apartment with a roommate, having multiple tenants within a single server sounds overwhelming, but provides a plethora of benefits. Revolving around efficiency and simplicity, some benefits of being a tenant amongst others include:

• Assistance from Providers: multi tenants can enjoy provider tools that enable faster deployment, stronger development, and streamlined system maintenance and management
• Reduced Costs - sharing infrastructure and databases yield lower costs, with development costs lowering as well
• Strong Integrations - having infrastructure and databases built to be shared amongst users encourages easy app integrations through APIs
• More Compute Capacity - infrastructure and databases expected to house multiple tenants are able to handle more compute resources demands, encouraging scalability and growth

The multi tenant approach is suitable for those looking for a hands-off maintenance approach, one that provides strong performance at a fraction of the cost.

Multi Tenant Disadvantages

Simplicity often comes at a cost, and with multi tenant solutions deployments, this cost comes in the form of these disadvantages:

• Greater Security Risks: sharing resources with multiple customers exposes systems to vulnerabilities that affect entire servers and user data, increasing risk of data breach
• Limited Customization: unlike single tenants, multiple tenant systems are relatively limited in their database and infrastructure customization options
• Noisy Neighbors - having multiple tenants means one tenant can consume more compute and storage resources than others, dropping bandwidth and performance as a whole

Despite these drawbacks, the multi tenant approach is great for a variety of users and organizations across varying industries.

Multi Tenant Use Cases

Sharing infrastructure and data capabilities with other users can drive down your IT cost significantly, allowing you to tap into open source integrations that make your development experience a lot more efficient. Such cost savings and efficiency can be enjoyed by startups and small-medium sized businesses, extracting tons of value from this approach while keeping operation costs low. In a similar vein, solutions that need to be cost effective, like web hosting, find value in being a tenant among many.

Customer facing apps and platforms that rely on dynamic scaling are two of the most popular use cases for multi tenancy. Think ecommerce platforms, ride share apps, food ordering apps, and mobile banking apps. Apps like these require large computing capacity and scalability, as well as provider assistance.

Multi Tenant vs Single Tenant - When to Use

Your approach to infrastructure will vary depending on your individual application and service needs.

A single tenant approach is one that offers higher security, flexibility, customization, and privacy, letting you customize your infrastructure and resources to how you see fit. Although without its flaws (mainly revolving around cost, scalability, and maintenance) the single tenant SaaS architecture provides a stable runway for apps that need high availability, security, and overall reliance. 

On the other hand, a multi tenant system comes at a lower cost and offers provider assistance, more compute capacity, and stronger integration capabilities. Drawbacks to the approach include greater security risks, limited customization, and potential bandwidth and performance disruptions. Despite these risks, multi tenancy is a great option for startups and applications looking for strong performance at a lower cost.

The main difference between single and multi tenant revolves around cost per performance. Single tenant will cost exponentially more than the multi tenant approach but will perform stronger than multi tenant. Multi tenant architecture won’t cost as much as single tenant, but won’t offer the same customization and security that single tenant does.

Infrastructure Hosting with Lyrid

The multi-tenant vs single tenant architecture debate has been one that’s been going on for ages in the cloud community. Both the single tenant and multi tenant approaches offer competent hosting options for your applications, but are starkly different in capabilities, with the biggest difference between single tenant and multi-tenant being cost per performance ratios. 

Whether you’re searching for infrastructure that doesn’t break the bank or one that offers extremely competent global hosting, look no further than Lyrid! The Lyrid platform offers a powerful infrastructure in the form of a PaaS, letting users deploy different clusters and databases that fit the needs of their business to a tee. Users have the ability to be a single tenant OR a multi tenant, all within the Lyrid platform. 

Looking to learn more? Book a demo with one of our product specialists!