Throwing Around the Term “Multi-tenancy” Isn’t Helpful: Advice to App Developers in the Cloud

Mar 14, 2011 by

Before I get started, this post IS NOT a post about why multi-tenancy is a good thing, why it’s better than virtualization, or anything of that nature. I had to get that out before starting – there are plenty of posts that deal with this topic (one, two, three, etc.). Instead, I want to tackle a different issue: the issue of what multi-tenancy means in a variety of contexts as well as how its positioning by vendors is leading to mass confusion.

No particular event has motivated this post; instead, this post is the result of a number of conversations and miscommunications. A while back, I started noticing some disturbing trends in the market, and more specifically, in vendor pitches. Let me use a real world example of what I mean. Frequently, the sales team at Apprenda ends up in the following type of conversation at some point in our sales cycle (clearly, this is distilled for brevity):

Prospect: “I saw that SaaSGrid offers multi-tenancy.”

Apprenda: “That’s right; SaaSGrid gives your application access to various types of multi-tenancy using the same code base and application assets. It’s actually amazingly unique and takes significant effort out of your R&D.”

Prospect: “Yeah, but doesn’t <insert your favorite PaaS/IaaS here> offer multi-tenancy?”  or “Well, the folks over at <insert your favorite PaaS/IaaS here> said they offer multi-tenancy too.”

Apprenda: “That’s different. Those technologies are themselves multi-tenant. SaaSGrid is a server technology that allows your single-tenant application to be multi-tenant at all application tiers without the huge effort typically associated with going multi-tenant.

Prospect: “Wait, but that’s exactly what I heard <insert your favorite PaaS/IaaS here> say. You’re saying that they don’t do the same thing as you.”

Apprenda: “Correct. Most, if not all, cloud platform vendors that refer to multi-tenancy are references to their own architectures, meaning they can efficiently pack their customers onto shared hardware/OS instances and offer you better service and a low price point. What you’re asking is how you can be multi-tenant and offer the same to your customers. Others in the cloud can’t help you with that.

Prospect: “OK, so using their service doesn’t make sense then?”

Apprenda: “That’s hard to answer, but it usually makes sense in conjunction with something like SaaSGrid. Clearly, being on something like EC2 (which is multi-tenant at the infrastructure tier) has advantages to you. Using SaaSGrid means you can really lower your internal cost of offering your service to your customers, and either put the savings to the bottom line or pass it along to your customers.”

Prospect: “What SaaSGrid does seems pretty magical now that I’ve cut through the marketing BS, how do you do it?”

Apprenda: “SaaSGrid is a runtime. When deployed to SaaSGrid, your application is transformed and new capabilities are instrumented into all tiers of your application. When running on SaaSGrid, these transformations and runtime instrumentations ‘inject’ SaaS architecture DNA into your non-SaaS web application.”

As you can see, this sort of conversation is a distraction. Whether it’s a conversation with an analyst, industry pundit, or potential customer, I’ve found that the most important thing to do upfront is to level-set on what both sides mean/understand when they say “multi-tenant.” Why so much confusion? I think it’s due to two factors:

  1. The marketing pitch offered up by vendors and how those marketing sound-bites are contexualized
  2. The general overloading of the term “multi-tenant”

On the marketing side, vendors do a good job of highlighting multi-tenancy. The problem is that the lack of context around the “feature” of multi-tenancy causes significant miscommunication. From a marketing perspective, vendors are sucked into the Green Crystals Marketing described by Bob Warfield a couple of years ago. Most cloud vendors are touting that they are multi-tenant; they want you to understand that they have a cost-effective and safe mechanism to isolate their customers from one another. To understand this better, I’ve taken the liberty to copy and paste (with references, of course) some content related to multi-tenancy from various cloud vendors:

The AppFabric Container provides base-level application infrastructure such as automatically ensuring scale out, availability, multi-tenancy and sandboxing of your application components. (Microsoft, Windows Azure)

Cloud-enabling infrastructure to allow secure multi-tenant deployments, including fully integrated management, monitoring, metering and billing infrastructure (CloudBees)

If you are running numerous applications/application instances, XAP’s fine-grained multi-tenancy allows you to share them across all available machines, instead of running only one instance per machine. This allows you to support more users on each machine. (GigaSpaces)

There a few others to use as examples, but this is fine for now. I’m not going to debate whether advertising that you are multi-tenant is an effective use of marketing real-estate. all of these snippets of text highlight multi-tenancy, but what is unclear is the context. For example, the first two indicate multi-tenancy at the platform tier; that is, multiple, unrelated code assets can share common OS instances. While this is powerful in its own right, it’s easy to understand how someone reading this text might walk away thinking “Excellent. Our requirements for our new SaaS project call for multi-tenancy. I can check that off our list.” The fact is, while ambiguous in terms of presentation, these technologies do not endow your application with multi-tenancy, they let you run in a multi-tenant environment. If you’re looking to build a multi-tenant app, you need to still architect multi-tenancy (‘architect’ is a verb according to the Oxford English Dictionary). In the gigaspaces case, although they refer to multi-tenancy in a way that lends itself to an “endowment” interpretation, it seems that they are focusing more on a grid approach of scaling the app to support more end users. While this is also valuable, it does not deal with segregation and isolation of logical groups of tenants (which is what multi-tenancy really is). At Apprenda, we even dealt with this definition in problem in our FAQ. This leads me to the next issue: term overloading.

Multi-tenancy is valid in 3 common computing contexts:

  1. Infrastructure: This is multi-tenancy the way someone like Amazon might refer to multi-tenancy on EC2. In the IaaS context, multi-tenancy means that multiple OS instances can run on the same physical hardware through hypervisor technology.
  2. Platform: PaaS multi-tenancy means that, like a Heroku or a CloudBees, the platform can isolate code from different apps/vendors on the same OS instance (usually by commingling processes and databases on OS instances). This removes the need to allocate a whole VM per application stack component, improving efficiency.
  3. Application: SaaS multi-tenancy, at least at the highest level of isolation, means that single runtime stack component instances are shared across multiple customers. For example, a single database might commingle data rows for thousands of customers while preserving isolation and performance.

Clearly, multi-tenancy means different things in all of these scenarios. There is nothing wrong with overloading, but it certainly doesn’t help the already high levels of confusion that exist around the word. If you’re an app developer in the Cloud looking to see what tech can help you, having a sense of clarity is most useful. Make sure you ask simple questions like:

  1. When you say ‘multi-tenant’, what do you mean?
  2. If multi-tenancy is a feature of your IaaS/PaaS, does that mean my app automatically becomes multi-tenant and I get to reap efficiencies from it?
  3. If I want my app to be multi-tenant on your IaaS/PaaS, will I have to still architect the app to be multi-tenant?

If you get answers of “I don’t know” or “No”, then clearly, you’re on your own if you want to build a multi-tenant SaaS app from the ground up.

Do you feel multi-tenancy is thrown around too often by the wrong parties? Is multi-tenancy confusing to you?

Before co-founding Apprenda, Sinclair held positions at Morgan Stanley, Eden Communications, and the State University of New York (SUNY). Sinclair holds a dual Bachelor of Science in Computer Science & Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude. Sinclair excels in understanding the economics of SaaS platforms and ecosystems, and is a frequent speaker and panelist at industry events

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2011 Predictions for Cloud, SaaS, Multi-Tenancy and More!

Jan 10, 2011 by

OK, it’s already 2011 and I’m a bit late on providing some predictions for 2011 – but now is better than never! I sat down and thought about events in 2010 and whether those events have created a meaningful disruption with near term potential to affect 2011 outcomes, and this is what I came up with. Some of it is based on intuition, some on knowledge, and some experiences I’ve had at Apprenda in working with customers, prospects, and others in the industry. This is more of a mental exercise in subjective extrapolation rather than “prediction”, so don’t hold me to these;-)

1)Adoption of SaaS by ISVs will pick up more steam in 2011

a.Overall, an overwhelming majority of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) deliver their software via the on-premises “packaged software” model. Consumption of software as a service (SaaS) offerings continues to grow at an amazing pace, but most of the demand has been satisfied by a couple of hundred companies that have surfaced in the past 10 years as wild success stories, such as Salesforce.com. As a result, I expect that on-premises player will continue to take notice and make the switch.

b.Competitive pressures within major verticals are becoming more and more real due to successful SaaS entrants, which will drive adoption of SaaS delivery as a market response. Existing software ISVs will start respond by moving part of their product lines to SaaS, or by choosing to offer down-market offerings as an initial experiment.

c.Counter to the perspective of many experts, packaged software ISVs will find strategies that work in their transition to SaaS. Transitional “poster-children” of each vertical will give confidence to other ISVs in the market that the transition can be made successfully.

d.Continued adoption of new technologies such as platform as a service (PaaS) and cloud application servers will bridge technical gaps that will ease the overall transition burden, fueling adoption of SaaS by more and more ISVs. I do not think SaaS is the nail in the coffin for existing ISVs, particularly with technologies like SaaSGrid in the mix which flatten the technical curve for both new application development as well as migrations.

e.Continued explosion of mobile usage creates further pressure (and significant opportunity) for companies to move to a SaaS delivery model. Most business applications that have a mobile angle typically need back-end systems to reconcile the data into primary applications, and SaaS is the only architecture that makes this feasible at scale across many customers.

2) The Upstack Scramble Intensifies

a.Big players continue to make big moves to seize the opportunity to control the new software battle ground in the cloud. Traditional platform vendors will realize that the application development and architecture tiers are huge opportunities, and that infrastructure virtualization and infrastructure tier technologies are not the competitive landscape of the future. Deals like the Heroku and Makara acquisitions make a lot of sense for players like Salesforce.com and Red Hat, respectively.

b.2011 and 2012 will be a make or break years for these big players, and the moves they make over the next 12 to 24 months will ultimately determine the next decade of control and leadership.

c.Commodity players, or players that have become commodity, seek to buy value up-stack through acquisitions.

3) Real Traction with Private Cloud/Internal Utility Computing and SaaS delivery

a.Mistakes and failures experienced in 2010 will be the lessons learned to drive the real solutions and seed private cloud and private PaaS adoption over the next 12 – 36 months.

b.Organizations want a unified and scalable platform for software delivery, and the vision of private cloud will begin to include technologies that sit above the virtual tier to give significant architecture and services value to internal development assets. A paradigm shift in how software developed internally for business units will kick off.

b. Enterprise projects will continue to explore leveraging Cloud architectures such as multi-tenancy for internal use. The cost savings and agility potential presents enormous savings profiles that push their way into enterprise development shops.

4) Cloud Washing Reaches Critical Mass and Collapses by EOY 2011

a.After attempting to cloud wash offerings, a number of small and mid-market ISVs will close shop due to competitive pressures and no real tactical response. This will help identify cloud washing as a poor strategy and that only real, measurable attempts to convert a SaaS model will lead to success.

b.Forces vendors to articulate how their strategies and solutions that is unique and truly “cloud.” Continued success of pure-cloud/SaaS plays will evidence that cloud washing adds no value.

5) Force.com Starts to Realize Momentum Potential

a.Force.com/Apex’s stuttered start begins to gain true rhythm now that Salesforce.com has diversified its cloud to be competitive outside of its proprietary track, particularly in Ruby and Java arenas due to Heroku and VMForce.

b.Force.com will continue to show strong among those extending Salesforce.com’s CRM functionality and potentially within the enterprise where it can be used to displace situational “spreadsheet” applications.

6) Cloud Middleware Provides Democratized Access to Complex Software Architectures

a.General development/programming skills declining, coupled with a continued increase in architecture complexity creates a gapping void that new middleware needs to fill

b.Just like the years when desktop OS’ spurred innovation by enabling companies to focus on their software and not the underlying complexities associated with its delivery – new solutions will fill the gap and catalyze a similar era of innovation once again.

c.Middleware solutions like SaaSGrid will drive multi-tenancy as a defacto standard since the primary concern of difficulty and cost to implement is trivialized.

7) QE[pick your number] won’t be a panacea for the economy – but SaaS and Cloud will help

a.Economic factors will continue to put pressure on operating budgets. Companies will be looking to do more with less; that is, they’ll want to boost efficiency while slashing budgets in order to survive in the modern economic climate. Due to size, IT budgets will be scrutinized and IT managers will be challenged to come up with solutions.

b.SaaS will be seen as a means of democratized access to solutions that drastically improve efficiencies while driving down the cost of IT. Infrastructure as a service will be leveraged to reduce the operating burden associated with in-house infrastructure.

c.Doing more with less, optimizing business performance – SaaS based B2B solutions will grow significantly in 2011 as a result.

I’d love to get everyone’s thoughts. Agree/disagree? Why? Did I miss something or does this seem to cover the right surface area?

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What if Salesforce.com weren’t multi-tenant?

May 5, 2009 by

In my last post, I mentioned that I was going to write one last follow up post on the blogosphere-wide multi-tenancy discussion, so here it is! Recently, Salesforce.com quantified some of its architecture, giving us visibility into what it takes to support a SaaS business of its magnitude: 1,000 servers for 55,000 customers and 1.5 million individual subscribers! That’s not too shabby. It also gives us some insight into architecture efficiency. Clearly, there are lots of questions that would need answering to give an accurate analysis, but enough data is there to have good discussion driven by a healthy dose of assumption.

Recently, Bob Warfield over at Smoothspan wrote a couple of excellent multi-tenancy oriented posts. In one of those posts, Warfield drilled into the Salesforce.com numbers I mentioned earlier in an attempt to quantify the impact of their architecture on cost of service. Warfield gave some analysis around multi-tenancy on the overall cost of service incurred by salesforce.com. Looking at the salesforce.com annual report, it’s apparent that it costs salesforce.com $0.12-$0.13 per $1.00 of revenue to deliver its service for a total of $127 million for the year on roughly $1 billion in subscription revenue. Warfield identified that if they’re running 1,000 servers, we can use Amazon pricing as a roughshod estimate of what the actual servers would cost them if they were running on the Amazon cloud: about $4.7 million per year. That leaves about $122 million unaccounted for! As Warfield pointed out, clearly there are lots of other expenses. It’s most likely that these expenses are due to lack of automation and overabundance of personnel due to said lack of automation. To a degree, this means that multi-tenancy is doing its job: the software’s architecture and resource utilization is but a fraction of total cost of service.

To understand this better, let’s use Warfield’s numbers and recast the scenario with the question “What if Salesforce.com weren’t multi-tenant?” Currently, we know that about 55 customers are supported per server. Many propose virtualization as a route to multi-tenancy since it’s so easy to fire up an instance on say, EC2, and create a 1-1 affinity for a customer to a server. If we imagine Salesforce.com to use this architecture instead, one where virtualization is used instead of a multi-tenant approach, we get a drastically different picture. I won’t calculate the EC2 costs, but instead will use Warfield’s numbers: one EC2 instance costs about $4,700 per year ($4.7 million/1,000 instances). If we dedicated a single instance to each customer (that’s 55,000 instances based on Salesforce.com’s number of customers), it would cost Salesforce.com $258 million! Let’s be generous and give it a 2:1 leverage (maybe there is some server sharing) and cut the instances in half, we’re still pushing $129 million. Assuming that this virtualized approach got rid of all internal staff and expenses at Salesforce.com related to cost of service, we’d have to hit that 2:1 leverage to even be competitive with their current cost structure. More than likely, taking a virtualized approach wouldn’t entirely get rid of Salesforce.com’s “out of architecture” expenses since I’m pretty confident that not ALL of the remaining $122 million is dedicated to simply running their 1,000 servers, but some big chunk is. Even if a virtualized or in the cloud approach had a 2:1 leverage and slashed 75%  of the $122 million, Salesforce.com still wouldn’t have the cost profile they do now.

Point? It seems multi-tenancy at $4.7 million worth of hardware/software resources has a big something to do with the overall cost profile. As Warfield pointed out, something else is making up a brunt of the cost, but the architecture approach certainly seems to have depressed it’s part of the cost to something reasonable. Now, how about a multi-tenant architecture on EC2? I’d love to see some cost specifics in the wild on this sort of arrangement!

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