Architectural Multi-tenancy

Almost every definition of cloud, amongst the myriad definitions that exist, include the notion of multi-tenancy, a.k.a. the ability to isolate customer-specific traffic, data, and configuration of resources using the same software and interfaces. In the case of SaaS (Software as a Service) multi-tenancy is almost always achieved via a database and configuration, with isolation provided at the application layer. This form of multi-tenancy is the easiest to implement and is a well-understood model of isolation.

In the case of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) this level of isolation is primarily achieved through server virtualization and configuration, but generally does not yet extend throughout the datacenter to resources other than compute or storage. This means the network components do not easily support the notion of multi-tenancy. This is because the infrastructure itself is only somewhat multi-tenant capable, with varying degrees of isolation and provisioning of resources possible. load balancing solutions, for example, support multi-tenancy inherently through virtualization of applications, i.e. Virtual IP Addresses or Virtual Servers, but that multi-tenancy does not go as “deep” as some might like or require. This model does support configuration-based multi-tenancy because each Virtual Server can have its own load balancing profiles and peculiar configuration, but generally speaking it does not support the assignment of CPU and memory resources at the Virtual Server layer.

One of the ways to “get around this” is believed to be the virtualization of the solution as part of the hardware solution. In other words, the hardware solution acts more like a physical server that can be partitioned via internal, virtualized instances of the solution*. That’s a lot harder than it sounds to implement for the vendor given constraints on custom hardware integration and adds a lot of overhead that can negatively impact the performance of the device. Also problematic is scalability, as this approach inherently limits the number of customers that can be supported on a single device. If you’re only supporting ten customers this isn’t a problem, but if you’re supporting ten thousand customers, this model would require many, many more hardware devices to implement. Taking this approach would drastically slow down the provisioning process, too, and impact the “on-demand” nature of the offering due to acquisition time in the event that all available resources have already been provisioned.

Resource pooling. The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or datacenter). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, network bandwidth, and virtual machines.

-- NIST Cloud Computing Definition v15

And yet for IaaS to truly succeed the infrastructure must support multi-tenancy, lest customers be left with only compute and storage resources on-demand without the benefit of network and application delivery network (load balancing, caching, web application firewall, acceleration, protocol security) components to assist in realizing a complete on-demand application architecture.

What is left as an option, then, is to implement multi-tenancy architecturally, by combining the physical and virtualized networking components in a way that is scalable, secure, and fits into the provider’s data center.