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Tenant lifecycle considerations in a multitenant solution

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When you're considering a multitenant architecture, it's important to consider all of the different stages in a tenant's lifecycle. On this page, we provide guidance for technical decision-makers about the stages of the lifecycle and the important considerations for each stage.

Trial tenants

When you build a SaaS solution, consider that many customers request or require trials before they commit to purchase a solution.

Trials bring along the following unique considerations:

  • Service requirements: Should trials be subject to the same data security, performance, and service-level requirements as the data for full customers?
  • Infrastructure: Should you use the same infrastructure for trial tenants as for full customers, or should you have dedicated infrastructure for trial tenants?
  • Migration: If customers purchase your service after a trial, how will they migrate the data from their trial tenants into their paid tenants?
  • Request process: Are there limits around who can request a trial? How can you prevent abuse of your solution? Do you allow automated creation of trial tenants or does your team get involved in each request?
  • Limits: What limits do you want or need to place on trial customers, such as time limits, feature restrictions, or limitations around performance?

In some situations, a freemium pricing model can be an alternative to providing trials.

Onboard new tenants

When onboarding a new tenant, consider the following questions:

  • Process: Will onboarding be a self-service, automated, or manual process?
  • Data residency: Does the tenant have any specific requirements for data residency? For example, are there data sovereignty regulations in effect?
  • Compliance: Does the tenant have to meet any compliance standards (such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and so on)?
  • Disaster recovery: Does the tenant have any specific disaster recovery requirements, such as a recovery time objective (RTO) or a recovery point objective (RPO)? Are these different from the guarantees that you provide to other tenants?
  • Information: What information do you require, to be able to fully onboard the tenant? For example, do you need to know their organization's legal name? Do you need their company logo to brand the application, and if so, what file size and format do you need?
  • Billing: Does the platform provide different pricing options and billing models?
  • Environments: Does the tenant require pre-production environments? And are there set expectations on availability for that environment? Is it transient (on-demand) or always available?

After tenants have been onboarded, they move into a 'business as usual' state. However, there are still several important lifecycle events that can occur, even when they are in this state.

Update tenants' infrastructure

You will need to consider how you apply updates to your tenants' infrastructure. Different tenants might have updates applied at different times.

See Updates for other considerations about updating tenants' deployments.

Scale tenants' infrastructure

Consider whether your tenants might have seasonal business patterns, or otherwise change the level of consumption for your solution.

For example, if you provide a solution to retailers, you might expect that certain times of the year will be particularly busy in some geographic regions, and quiet at other times. Consider whether this seasonality affects the way you design and scale your solution. Be aware of how seasonality might affect noisy neighbor issues, such as when a subset of tenants experience a sudden and unexpected increase in load that reduces the performance of other tenants. You can consider applying mitigations, which might include scaling individual tenants' infrastructure, moving tenants between deployments, and provisioning a sufficient level of capacity to handle spikes and troughs in traffic.

Move tenants between infrastructure

You might need to move tenants between infrastructure for a number of reasons, such as:

  • Rebalancing: You follow a vertically partitioned approach to map your tenants to infrastructure, and you need to move a tenant to a different deployment in order to rebalance your load.
  • Upgrades: A tenant upgrades their SKU or pricing tier, and they need to be moved to a single-tenant, dedicated deployment with higher isolation from other tenants.
  • Migrations: A tenant requests their data be moved to a dedicated data store.
  • Region moves: A tenant requires their data be moved to a new geographic region. This requirement might occur during a company acquisition, or when laws or geopolitical situations change.

Consider how you move your tenants' data, and how you redirect requests to the new set of infrastructure that hosts their instance. You should also consider whether moving a tenant might result in downtime, and make sure tenants are fully aware of the risk.

Merge and split tenants

It's tempting to think of tenants or customers as static, unchanging entities. However, in reality, this often isn't true. For example:

  • In business scenarios, companies might be acquired or merge, including companies located in different geographic regions.
  • In business scenarios, companies might split or divest.
  • In consumer scenarios, individual users might join or leave families.

Consider whether you need to provide capabilities to manage the merging and separation of data, user identities, and resources. Also, consider how data ownership affects your handling of merge and split operations. For example, consider a consumer photography application built for families to share photos with one another. Are the photos owned by the individual family members who contributed them, or by the family as a whole? If users leave the family, should their data be removed or remain in the family's data set? If users join another family, should their old photos move with them?

Offboard tenants

It's also inevitable that tenants will occasionally need to be removed from your solution. In a multitenant solution, this brings along some important considerations, including the following:

  • Retention period: How long should you maintain the customer data? Are there legal requirements to destroy data, after a certain period of time?
  • Reonboarding: Should you provide the ability for customers to be reonboarded? Will their data still be available to them if they rejoin within the data retention period?
  • Rebalancing: If you run shared infrastructure, do you need to rebalance the allocation of tenants to infrastructure?

Deactivate and reactivate tenants

There are situations where a customer's account might need to be deactivated or reactivated. For example:

  • The customer has requested deactivation. In a consumer system, a customer might opt to unsubscribe.
  • The customer can't be billed, and you need to deactivate the subscription.

Deactivation is separate to offboarding in that it's intended to be a temporary state. However, after a period of time, you might choose to offboard a deactivated tenant.

Contributors

This article is maintained by Microsoft. It was originally written by the following contributors.

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Consider the pricing models you will use for your solution.