jargon

Comparison

Multi-tenancyvsNoisy neighbour

Multi-tenancy

several teams or customers share one cluster, and every performance question becomes 'is it us or is it them'.

Running multiple independent workloads or customers on shared infrastructure. It is what makes a platform economical, and it introduces isolation, fairness, quota and noisy-neighbour problems that dedicated infrastructure simply does not have. The critical distinction is whether the tenants trust one another: sharing between internal teams and sharing between hostile customers require entirely different boundaries.

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Noisy neighbour

one customer's enormous batch job makes every other customer's requests slow, on shared infrastructure they cannot see.

One tenant's resource consumption degrading others on shared infrastructure. It is the defining operational problem of multi-tenancy, and it appears at every layer: CPU, connection pools, cache space, database locks. Per-tenant quotas, bulkheads and fair queueing are the mitigations; "we will notice" is not.

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