A performance evaluation of multi-tenant data tier design patterns in a containerized environment

Software as a Service (SaaS) has become one of de facto approach for deploying cloud base services or applications for many businesses. At the core of SaaS is Multi-tenancy; multi-tenancy gives customers (i.e. tenants) and software provider vast opportunities to leverage the power of cloud infrastructure by consolidating operational entities. The drive toward multi-tenancy in SaaS application is a result of the economical benefit derived by shared development and maintenance cost. This paper empirically evaluates the performance of multi-tenancy models in a containerized environment. Our results show that in a containerized environment, dedicated and isolated schema performed reasonably well in terms of latency compared to shared schema model. Although the shared schema model proved to more resource efficient, it performance is greatly affected by finite resources shared by many concurrent tenants.