Technology shifts are creating a lot of chaos, including the way we use words. Cloud. SDN. Multi-tenant. Instances. They’re all inter-related and seem to have different meanings depending on who’s trying to sell you what today.
That’s more than a tad bit disconcerting, because you know what you mean when you say «multi-tenant» but other people (trying to sell you stuff) may have a different definition. And that means when you ask about it and they say yes, you may not be getting what you expected – and that’s not good for either end of the transaction.
So let’s talk network virtualization today, particularly with respect to the difference between «instances» and «tenants.»