Multi-Tenancy Explained

This post is an aggregation of a lot of valuable resources that I found on the internet when I was trying to understand Multi-Tenancy. The pictures are attributed to their respective authors. Please look at the References at the bottom of the post.

What is Multi-Tenancy?

Multi-tenancy is the ability to run multiple customers on a single software instance installed on multiple servers to increase resource utilization by allowing load balancing among tenants, and to reduce operational complexity and cost in managing the software to deliver the service.

Multi-tenancy is not multi-instance architecture where separate software instances (or hardware systems) are set up for different client organizations.

A multi-tenant architecture, would expect a software application to virtually partition its data and configuration so that each client organization works with a customized virtual application instance.
Tenants on a multi-tenant system can operate as though they have an instance of the software entirely to themselves which is completely secure and insulated from any impact by other tenants.

Strategies of Multi-Tenancy

Three buckets of multi-tenancy strategies:

Role of an Agile Architect in Chinese!

A few weeks back I was contacted by Bryan Zheng. Bryan is a part-time editor of Agile Community of InfoQ China and his full-time job is working as the senior editor of Programmer Magazine which is a publication of CSDN.net. CSDN is the world’s largest Chinese-speaking online IT community with 2.6 million registered members. Programmer Magazine is the only and most popular software development magazine in China.

Bryan wanted to translate a couple of my articles to Chinese for the IT community thriving in China. First translation was for the article “Role of an Agile Architect”.  The English version of the article has already been published on Agile Journal and is also present on this blog site. You can download the Chinese translation which has been published in the Programmer Magazine.

Thanks to Bryan for sending me the pdf.

Role of an Agile Architect

This post is a reproduction of my article which has been published on Agile Journal by the name The Shiny New Agile Architect. You can download the pdf here.

Recently there has been a lot of talk on whether we need an Architect on agile teams or not. There have been never-ending discussions on various forums both inside organizations and out in the public questioning the value that an architect can bring to the agile project where the architecture evolves with every iteration. This has led many traditional Architects to scramble for cover and opened gates for a new breed of architect, the Agile Architect. The traditional ivory tower Architects are gradually proving to be the weakest link in the chain for agile projects. The bulk of the traditional Architect’s responsibilities are now split amongst the agile team, thus leaving them without a lot of work that they were previously doing. The Agile Architects are emerging in line with Charles Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest.” The role of an Agile Architect on the team is unquestionable and many agile teams vouch for the fact that he is one of the most valuable members of any agile software development team.
So who is an Agile Architect? How do you identify if the Architect on your team is an Agile Architect?