I agree that it is a completely valid approach, especially if you can afford it, but in my opinion it is just a single tenant application that can be easily spun up. For example, what if you want to manage all of your "tenants" within an admin interface. With a separate instance for all your tenants this is not really possible without additional development or a completely separate admin application.
What tends to happen is a first immediate client is needed along with a couple of sales demo clients. This buys time for the business to see if it’s viable before we bring on complexity.
But I agree clones of a core system isn’t multi tenancy.
For what it’s worth I tend to tell clients we won’t be sustainable after 4-5 of these such clones.
For people considering the clone approach let me caution one issue that comes up about 90% of the time. A client will as for a custom feature and be willing to pay for it for that “one” clone. These divergences are allowed to happen because we aren’t multi-tenant yet. You need to work hard to educate during this phase so you don’t create too much work down the line when you finally consolidate and refactor.
Exactly! That's the point.
Common usage 95% of of tenants is 20% of your traffic.
1% is 60% of traffic. Rest is the Rest.
Balancing is always weird. 4000 tenants can share a 3 servers and be fine. 1 client might actually need dedicated hardware.
Turns out AWS gets painful to manage beyond 1000 tenants. You start running into various account limits.
Devops it so that you can create new tenants with a script (in fact a script that is run by the signup codebase) that starts them out in cluster A.
Migration to cluster B would definitely be involved if you're not using a shared database - so potentially be ready to know your potential clients up front to get them on the correct cluster ahead of time.
I’ve often had teams of 2-6 to handle every technical aspect of a company with millions of visits. That includes feature development and support. K8 seems to need a large team just to keep it running.
At one point we had a dozen different Amazon accounts to keep everything separate. Thankfully the business model was crap, so if resolved itself.
Did Amazon mere said, "you are doing it wrong", without an explanation? In retrospective, do you think you could have done better? I'm looking to hear the lessons you learned, so may be, I don't end up making that mistake ;)
S3, I think they did up the bucket limit on request, but maxed out at 1,000. That was years ago though.