Right now, students all over the country are leaving home, starting university, and moving into their halls of residence. From my experience, that’s usually a single building, teeming with rooms, where they can get to know one another, collaborate on ideas, and share student facilities, like cooking. It’s a cheaper way of living too.

A true multi-tenant architecture, in other words.

This got me thinking about software development within that same multi-tenanted architecture.

First things first: what is multi-tenant? It is defined as a single instance of a software application serving multiple customers. These ‘tenants’ can customise some parts of the application, but not the application’s core. It’s cheaper because development and maintenance costs are shared, in contrast with single-tenancy, where each customer has their own software instance. Moreover, you only need to make updates once—in a single-tenancy architecture, the updates are endless.

Multi-tenancy can light the touch paper on your application development. As organisations embrace cloud, big data, the Internet of Things, and other digital disruptors that are redefining the role of IT in business, they need a proactive, comprehensive and dynamic automation strategy. Especially release automation, which accelerates the launch of innovative new services, while supporting reliability and control to enable the modern agile enterprise.

Multi-tenant release automation reduces TCO

As part of this digital transformation, organisations want to play in sandboxes: test-driving their neat new services and (mini) applications to make certain they don’t fall over in production. Automic is the only ARA vendor offering a multi-tenant service that can be deployed in the clouds. This enables enterprises to serve multiple departments and clients in isolation from each other on a single, shared multi-tenant platform, scaling for extremely large environments while driving cost of ownership down, simplifying operations, and maintenance. 

Here at Automic, for example, more than 300 customers have signed up for their own private sandbox on the Automic multi-tenant cloud. It operates on its own cloud, so organizations can get a feel for how the Automic platform can help drive digital transformation in a world of multiple rapid releases and deployments. This “try it before you buy it” service is the first of its kind in the release automation market.

This multi-tenant model isn’t just designed to help test drive Automic—it helps managed service providers (MSPs) and other large organisations kick sand in the faces of competitors. In cloud computing, the meaning of multi-tenancy architecture has broadened because of new service models that take advantage of virtualisation and remote access. MSPs, for instance, can run one instance of its application on one instance of a database and provide web access to multiple customers. In such a scenario, each tenant’s data is isolated and remains invisible to other tenants. It means MSPs can deliver great service to more customers at lower cost.

It doesn’t stop there. This multi-tenant release automation model helps large enterprises—saddled with slow-moving, legacy infrastructures—to bridge the gap between development teams launching mobile and web-based services almost non-stop, and the operations team who are more concerned with maintaining reliability and continuity. A multi-tenant release automation product enables organisations like these to be agile in the back end, and be compliant and scalable in the front office.

One more thought. Most university halls of residence are very tall buildings. Some so high they reach into the clouds. Even more reason to consider multi-tenancy release automation in the cloud.