Database-per-Tenant Architectures with Atlas

Intro

This guide describes how to utilize Atlas to manage database schemas in "Database per Tenant" architectures, a common pattern for deploying multi-tenant applications.

What is a Database per Tenant Architecture?

In a "Database per Tenant" architecture, each tenant has its own dedicated database (or a schema). Database-per-tenant architectures are commonly used in situations where there are considerations around data isolation, security, and scalability. It is worth noting it contrary to creating a fully isolated deployment for each tenant, in this architecture compute and other resources are shared across tenants.

Alternative Multi-Tenant Architectures

In addition to a Database per Tenant architecture, there are other common multi-tenant architectures:

Shared Database, Shared Schema: In this architecture, all tenants share the same database and schema and are differentiated by a tenant identifier column in each table.
Full Isolation: In this architecture, each tenant has its own isolated deployment, including its own database, schema, and compute resources.

Advantages

Database per Tenant architectures offer several advantages over other multi-tenant architectures:

Data Isolation: Each tenant has its own dedicated database, providing strong data isolation between tenants. By isolating data on the database level, you can ensure that data from one tenant is not accessible to another tenant, providing better security and privacy guarantees.
Data Compliance: By isolating tenants on the database level, you can ensure that each tenant's data is stored in compliance with data regulations and privacy laws relevant to that tenant. For example, you can host the specific database in a region that complies with the tenant's data residency requirements or even in your customer's own infrastructure.
Performance: By isolating tenants on the database level, you can ensure that the performance of one tenant's database operations does not impact the performance of other tenants - eliminating the "noisy neighbor" problem. Additionally, you can utilize different instance types or configurations for each tenant's database to meet their specific performance requirements.
Simplified Development (compared to shared database architectures): Codebases for multi-tenant applications are notoriously complex. Every action against the database must be made "tenant-aware" to ensure that data is correctly isolated. By isolating tenants on the database level, applications become effectively single-tenant, simplifying development, reducing the mental overhead of handling multi-tenancy, and reducing the risk of data leakage between tenants.
Simplified Deployment (compared to full isolation): In a full isolation architecture, each tenant has its own deployment, requiring separate infrastructure, monitoring, and maintenance. By isolating tenants on the database level, you can share infrastructure, monitoring, and maintenance across tenants, reducing operational overhead.
Simplified Maintenance: Running tenants on different databases simplifies maintenance tasks: Deleting, exporting, and loading tenant data do not require special toolings as most databases offer these functionalities.

Challenges

This architecture decisions is one of my biggest regrets, and we are currently in the process of rebuilding into a single database model.

HN Thread on Database per Tenant Architecture

Despite their numerous advantages, Database per Tenant architectures present unique challenges, mostly around managing database schema migrations:

Migration Duration - As the number of tenants grows, deployment time increases linearly with the number of tenants. This is especially problematic when deploying schema migrations that take time, such as data migrations or index rebuilds.
Schema Consistency - Ensuring that all tenant databases have consistent schema versions can be complex. Any schema change needs to be applied across all tenant databases, which can be time-consuming and error-prone.
Detecting Drift - Migrations can fail due to various reasons, such as network issues, database downtime, or data dependent issues (such as constraint violations). Such inconsistencies can cause application downtime for users, as new application versions are rolled out and expect database changes to already have been applied. Detecting these inconsistencies (schema-drift) across a large fleet of databases can be challenging.
Rollbacks - Rolling back schema changes across multiple databases can be difficult. In a shared database architecture, rolling back a schema change is a single operation. In a database per tenant architecture, rolling back a schema change requires rolling back the change on each tenant's database, which needs to be orchestrated somehow.