Learn how to navigate the common pitfalls, from the dreaded "Noisy Neighbor" issue to the "DIY trap," and find out how our cutting-edge solution can revolutionize your approach to multi-tenancy. Don't miss this opportunity to boost efficiency and elevate your cloud infrastructure management.
Why Multi-Tenancy is the Right Strategy from a Storage Expert's Perspective
Multi-tenancy offers numerous advantages, including efficiency, scalability, and minimal provisioning. One of the most persuasive arguments for adopting multi-tenancy is the potential for resource consolidation, leading to improved utilization and substantial cost savings.
In the history of system engineering, there has been a continuous debate between centralized consolidation and distributed, loosely coupled approaches. Consolidation and resource sharing are essential for achieving efficiency; however, the success of a consolidated platform depends on its capacity to manage diverse co-located workloads from different tenants while maintaining high availability and preventing performance impacts between tenants. Without these guarantees, decision-makers might hesitate to commit significant resources to a single system.
During my 18-year tenure in the petabyte-scale storage world, I frequently encountered CTOs with "experience scars" who established policies to limit the potential blast radius of a failure, such as never allocating more than 100TB to a single appliance. Even today, numerous companies continue to apply "divide and conquer" strategies to their infrastructure, progressively increasing their acceptable blast radius.
Our success in creating a storage product specifically designed for massive resource sharing and with seven nines of availability has convinced various enterprise companies to reevaluate their architectural constraints and embrace consolidation for unlocking substantial efficiencies.
Modern cloud data services provide exceptional availability levels, enabling even well-funded organizations to confidently adopt consolidation and multi tenant software architectures in their deployments.
Successful companies like Netflix and Salesforce operate within a shared multi-tenant environment, using a single code version in production, shared services, and minimal provisioning during onboarding. This approach demonstrates the power of multi-tenancy in today's competitive landscape.
As systems continue to expand exponentially, sharing resources between consumers becomes increasingly important. Easy provisioning can be a trap that leads to resource sprawl and slows company growth. It's crucial not to be enticed by seemingly simple design solutions that may create long-term challenges.
Embracing the Multi-Tenancy Cloud Era
As you may already be aware, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Just as companies face significant challenges when transitioning from a monolithic architecture to microservices, hurdles arise when adopting multi-tenancy. It's important to be aware of common pitfalls that are many times ignored but are critical to successful multi-tenant SaaS operations.
Pitfall #1 - The "Noisy Neighbor" issue.
Tenants can exhibit different behaviors, and while co-hosting a variety of workloads on the same resource often results in optimal performance, it may occasionally lead to cross-tenant severe performance degradation and even unavailability.
Pitfall #2 - “Smoothie disassemble”
Tenant level metrics are the base for identifying events in their right context, so pitfall number two, which I compare to extracting the recipe from a smoothie drink, is trying to analyze performance degradations and SLI using legacy tools, it won’t work, you need a dedicated set of tools that understand the tenant context of each operation.
Pitfall #3 - “Fish to aquarium ratio”
There are a plethora of companies telling you they can recommend cost optimizations by identifying under-provisioned resources (or idle ones) - but when dealing with resources that are shared - you need tenant insights to understand if the tenant cost per resource is improving or if a single tenant is the main cause for your expensive scale out events.
Pitfall #4 - “Hammer a screw pitfall”
The last pitfall is the most important one - use the right tool for the job - do not try to solve these problems using tools that were not specifically designed for these multi-tenant challenges, they will be too expensive.
You need a comprehensive solution that can work effectively across all your shared services and provide you with a holistic approach, lucky for you we have built just that :-)
Summary
At SuperTenant, we are firm believers in the power of multi-tenancy to unlock significant efficiency benefits. Our mission is to help companies fully embrace multi-tenancy and overcome the pitfalls outlined above with a simple-to-integrate, no-code solution.
Our product offers customer-centric observability and management for multi-tenant and shared infrastructures, providing the best of both worlds: multi-tenancy efficiency combined with tenant-centric control and management.
Stay tuned for more updates on the progress and capabilities of our solution in the coming months.