Engineering

Multi-Tenant Architecture: Six Hard Lessons

Tenant isolation decisions made in week one shape your product for years. Here is what we would tell our past selves.

Marcus OyelaranCTO9 min read
Multi-Tenant Architecture: Six Hard Lessons

Isolation is a product decision

Shared schema, schema-per-tenant, and database-per-tenant each imply different pricing, compliance, and support realities. Pick with the commercial team in the room.

Enforce tenancy in the database

Application-level filtering will eventually miss a query. Row-level security makes the wrong query impossible rather than unlikely.

Bill from one ledger

Usage shown in dashboards and usage charged on invoices must come from the same source. Two sources of truth guarantee a billing dispute.

  • SaaS
  • PostgreSQL
  • Architecture

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