I attended the Alfresco conference in London in the middle of November and there was a fair amount of talk about Alfresco’s cloud offering that – if it’s not already available – was due to be launched fairly soon. It will be a hosted service and will allow a single instance of Alfresco to host multiple sites (or tenants). This is usually referred to as multi-tenancy. There are a number of different approaches but the simplest one involves sharing the same database; at the database level you can think of each entry in a table, e.g. forum posts, having something like a site ID column that indicates which site the entry belongs to.

I started thinking about it and I don’t get it. I understand technically how multi-tenancy works; I just don’t see the benefits of making an application multi-tenant aware! More…