Evaluating degrees of tenant isolation in multitenancy patterns: A case study of cloud-hosted Version Control System (VCS)

One of the key concerns of implementing multitenancy (i.e., serving multiple tenants with a single instance of an application) on the cloud is how to enable the required degree of isolation between tenants, so that the required performance of one tenant does not affect other tenants. There is little research which provides empirical evidence on the required degree of isolation between tenants under different cloud deployment conditions. This paper applies COMITRE (COmponent-based approach to Multitenancy Isolation Through request RE-routing) to empirically evaluate the degree of isolation between tenants enabled by multitenancy patterns for cloud-hosted Version Control System (VCS). We implemented three multitenancy patterns (i.e., shared component, tenant-isolated component, and dedicated component) by developing a multitenant component using the FileSystem SCM plugin integrated within Hudson. The study revealed that dedicated component provides the highest degree of isolation between tenants (compared to shared component and tenant-isolated component) in terms of error% (i.e., the percentage of errors with unacceptably slow response times) and throughput. System load of tenants showed no variability, and hence did not influence the degree of tenant isolation for all the three multitenancy patterns. We also provide some recommendations to guide an architect in implementing multitenancy isolation on similar VCS tools like Subversion and CVS.