What is multi tenant architecture?

Multi tenant architecture is a software design where a single instance of an application serves many customers at once, with each customer’s data kept separate and private. Everyone shares the same building, but each has a locked apartment.

It is the backbone of most SaaS products. Instead of running a separate copy of the software for every client, the provider runs one and partitions the data. That keeps costs down and updates simple, since a fix ships to everyone at once.

The engineering challenge is isolation. Tenants share infrastructure but must never see each other’s data, so a lot of careful design goes into keeping those walls solid.

Sthenos builds multi tenant platforms on cloud computing infrastructure, with isolation designed in from the first line of code.

Related terms: multi tenancy, tenant (cloud computing), resource pooling.

What is the difference between multi tenant and single tenant?

Single tenant gives each customer a dedicated instance. Multi tenant shares one instance across customers with isolated data.