The Tenant Manager: A Pattern for Multi-tenant Applications

Traditional multi-user applications are designed to provide the same functional and non-functional responses to all the users. However, customers of the contemporary applications may have different expectations from the application. To design an application with the ability to meet diverse requirements of customers, is a recurring problem in various domains including software applications. This paper presents a pattern called “Tenant Manager” that can be employed to cater such diverse set of requirements. We present a reference architecture of the pattern along with examples and known uses. Our analysis of the various use cases shows that the pattern is useful in designing applications for heterogeneous consumers.