About Multi-Tenancy

Overview

Multi-Tenancy is an architecture that allows for multiple independent installs of Decisions to be run as instances on a single Server. When a Multi-Tenancy is established, a copy of the Decisions Windows Service is created for each individual Tenant.

Note on Multi-Tenancy Behavior

Since a copy of the Windows Service is created for each Tenant, each Tenant is able to act as a full copy of the Decisions application in runtime.

Considerations

Due to this, by default, MT environments typically have a 300-500 mb sized storage footprint. This amount of space coupled with the consequences of hosting a large number of environments can lead to a high increase in storage volume.

Due to the amount of storage leveraged, MT environments are best suited for separating data between a small set of customers/users.

Contact Support before creating a Multi-Tenancy for larger sets.

In Decisions, the Server responsible for hosting the Application and its Database is called the Control Instance Server. The Control Instance is where tenant maintenance is handled and where relational data about the tenant is stored. The system administrator can control permissions, account assignments, and other parameters from the Control Instance. It is not recommended to develop on a Control Instance due to the potential for errors in the tenant environments.

Set a Service Account with a Password That is Encoded in Settings.XML

When running a Multi-Tenant environment, a service account must be set with a password that is encoded in Settings.XML. At every upgrade, "Show Service Settings" MUST be selected and the correct password must be added. Otherwise, a service account will have to be added to every Tenant in Services and then added to Settings.

A Tenant is one of the independent running instances on a multi-tenant server. Tenants in a Multi-Tenant Decisions environment have the ability to customize some parts of the application, such as the look and feel of the Decisions Portal, however, the tenant cannot customize the underlying application code. Tenants will all run the same version of the application with a multi-tenancy architecture, the provider only has to make updates once. Each tenant runs on its own Database with its own secure install, so data is isolated and remains invisible to other tenants.

Developing on a Control Instance

Although it is possible to develop in a Control Instance on a Multi-Tenant Server, is not recommended to do so. Control Instances are used for managing tenants, thus, changes that can negatively impact this Control Instance through testing may affect the Multi-Tenant Server that it's built upon.

Overview

What's Next