Build a Multi-Tenant Architecture
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You can implement multi-tenancy with Atlas so that a single instance of an application serves multiple tenants. Your initial design decisions for a multi-tenant architecture can have unintended effects over time as requirements evolve or scaling expectations change.
The best approach might depend on the following factors:
Projected scaling requirements (number of tenants and their data use)
Security and isolation requirements
Uniformity or variability of data requirements across tenants
Consider these factors as you decide on the best approach to use for your multi-tenant architecture.
When you design a multi-tenant architecture, consider the following approaches:
Description | If you have a small and stable number (up to a few
hundred) tenants with varied data requirements and strict access
control requirements, consider one database per tenant. | If you expect an indefinitely growing number of tenants, and the
structure of data and query requirements is relatively
consistent across tenants, consider having the tenants'
data coexist in shared collections within a single database. You
can use a tenantId field in each document to logically
segment data between tenants. |
Benefits |
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Considerations | You might:
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Avoid All Tenants with their Own Collections in a Single Database.
Important
Security Considerations
In all of the following approaches, you build a multi-tenant architecture in a single cluster. You share the replication oplog and user data across all tenants, which might result in potential security concerns. To secure data partitioning, you must deploy a single small replica set for each tenant with unique authentication.
Each Tenant in its Own Database
If you have a small and stable number (up to a few hundred) tenants with varied data requirements and strict access control requirements, consider creating one database per tenant.
This approach has the following benefits:
For added security, the database user can limit tenant data access. Atlas limits 100 database users per project by default.
To account for unique access patterns for variable data structures across tenants, you can set up indexing.
To move a single tenant onto its own dedicated resources, you can migrate or scale an entire tenant's isolated data to new resources (for example, another cluster).
Consider that you might:
Add more complexity for the application tier.
Have redundant collections and indexes across tenants.
Encounter problems at scale in a single cluster. The underlying data files required for each new collection and index consume computational resources.
Each tenant has its own logical database on the same cluster. This approach allows for easy customization and strong security. It permits backups and maintenance actions for one tenant without impacting the others.
However, this approach can increase the setup effort and needed computational resources. Interactions between tenants require connections to multiple databases. Some MongoDB commands work only between collections in the same database.
Each collection and index is stored on disk as a separate file, which can lead to a very large number of open files and high memory usage. To mitigate this, use less than 1000 data files (collections and individual indexes) per node. To learn more, see Collection and Index Limits.
All Tenants in a Single Database with Shared Collections
If you expect an indefinitely growing number of tenants, the structure of data and query requirements is relatively consistent across tenants, and you have less strict access control requirements, consider using a single database with shared collections for all tenants.
This approach has the following benefits:
Highly scalable (for example, you can shard the cluster)
Simplifies ongoing maintenance (for example, indexing for new query patterns)
Consider the following potential issues:
A single database user could access this large pool of multi-tenant data.
The segmentation of data is purely logical and must be enforced in the application tier.
All tenants can have documents in all collections. The multi-tenancy
logic exists in the application layer. Every document must have a
tenantId field, and every database query must filter by that field.
You must manage security at the application level.
You might encounter scaling issues in the long-term. Any maintenance that you perform affects all tenants at the same time. While this approach works well for many small tenants of the same size, it doesn't work well if the tenant sizes vary. Also, you might find customizing the settings for each tenant difficult.
All Tenants with their Own Collections in a Single Database
Avoid putting all tenants with their own collections into a single database. While this approach prevents customization issues, it complicates the application coding, and exacerbates scaling issues in the long-term.