Conceptual Approach for Performance Isolation in Multi-tenant Systems

Multi-tenant applications (MTAs) share one application instance among several customers to increase the efficiency. Due to the tight coupling, customers may influence each other with regards to the performance they observe. Existing research focuses on methods and concrete algorithms to performance-isolate the tenants. In this paper, we present conceptual concerns raised when serving a high amount of users. Based on a load balancing cluster of multiple MTAs, we identified potential positions in an architecture where performance isolation can be enforced based on request admission control. Our discussion shows that different positions come along with specific pros and cons that have influence on the ability to performance-isolate tenants.