I was recently reviewing some sales and marketing materials regarding building out Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Part of these materials included attributes of IaaS, one of which is multi-tenancy. Having been working with some large enterprise customers lately around private cloud, this attribute really got me thinking.
In most cases for the enterprises I have been working with, the private cloud is about agility and the workloads are all owned and related to the same business line. From the macro perspective, there is effectively one tenant, yet from a micro perspective (workload) there are multiple tenants that may require some isolation for purposes of service level and resource management.
Why is this important? Multi-tenancy is expensive. It requires additional resources and overhead to manage including encryption and key management, isolation across network, compute and storage, and additional support for tenant management. Remove this overhead and those physical resources can be focused on workloads instead of overhead.