Multitenancy

Multi-tenancy is an architecture in which a single instance of a software application serves multiple customers. Each customer is called a tenant.

Multi-tenancy can be economical because software development and maintenance costs are shared.

In a multitenancy environment, multiple customers share the same application, running on the same operating system, on the same hardware, with the same data-storage mechanism. The distinction between the customers is achieved during application design, thus customers do not share or see each other’s data. Compare this with virtualization where components are abstracted enabling each customer application to appear to run on a separate physical machine.

Tenants may be given the ability to customize some parts of the application, such as color of the user interface ( UI) or business rules, but they cannot customize the application’s code.