Host Rubert Blumen is joined by Salesforce architect Ian Varley to discuss multi-tenancy. Their conversation covers how multi-tenancy differs from multi-user, popular architectures for multi-tenancy, why Salesforce uses a shared resource architecture, how Salesforce scales horizontally, the economics of a mix of small and large users, the importance of scaling down, scheduling, rate limiting and fairness, the threat model of a multi-tenant system, ensuring isolation between users, and technical challenges of migrating users between shards while maintaining availability and consistency.

Links from this episode

• The Architecture Files #10: L33T M10y by Ian Varley
• Salesforce developer documentation on multi-tenancy
• ACM Queue Condos and Clouds by Pat Helland
• The Magic of Multi-Tenancy by Igal Levy