Elasticity in Multitenant Databases Through Virtual Tenants

Multi-tenancy has shown promising results in achieving high operational cost efficiency by sharing hardware and software resources among multiple customer organizations, called tenants. In the context of cloud computing, this paradigm enables cloud providers to reduce operational costs by dividing resources and to simplify application management and maintenance. These benefits come with associated challenges of isolation, dynamic scaling and elasticity. This paper explores these issues in the context of multitenant Database-as-a-Service. In addition, we propose a solution “virtual tenants” to solve the problem of elasticity and isolation in multitenant database applications. Index Terms – multitenancy, Cloud computing, database as a service, elasticity.