In the previous two parts of this series of articles on How to manage your customers in an Azure multi-tenant environment:
We highlight important points of the journey that we must take into account when creating a multitenant solution:
Even so, with all this information to work on, there are points that we still need to analyze and know to make decisions:
These are the points that we will review in this new article, and at this level, we will finally be able to decide which pricing model to apply to our system.
There are several ways to carry out this management. We must have within our radar concepts such as:
When designing how we will manage computing resources. We can find more detail in Architectural approaches for compute in multitenant solutions
There is a specific aspect of this resource management that I would like to emphasize. Returning to the simile of “tenant” of a house that we made in the first part of this series of articles; we can find the typical Neighbors.
In the case of an Azure shared environment, with shared total system capacity, a “noisy neighbor” could be that tenant that uses the shared resources so much that it causes them to become unavailable to another tenant:
As we can imagine, this scenario can be complicated when there are more than two apartments in the building and more than one “noisy neighbor”. To mitigate these cases we can consider different strategies:
To ensure that our Tenants will have the service they need at all times. Remember that “dedicated environment illusion” we discussed in the first article of this series.
At first sight we may think: “Azure cost management seems complicated enough for a single Tenant, how should it be for multiple Tenants?” How can I charge my clients for the cost of Azure resources they have used?
En el artículo “Architectural approaches for cost management and allocation in a multitenant solution” podemos encontrar todas las herramientas necesarias y consideraciones que tenemos a disposición para este tema:
Regarding cost management, we must take into account the precision we want. To do this, we can ask ourselves the following questions:
and analyze how to respond to each of them with the resources provided by Azure.
At this point, we are clear about everything we need to be able to manage a multi-tenant environment in Azure. But as usual, we want to make money with our platform, so what pricing models can I use?
The answer to this question is closely linked to what our business model will be since it will have a direct relationship with the price model to offer.
The price models are already complex in themselves, in this article we will review some brushstrokes about them. You can find more details in “Pricing models for a multitenant solution”.
Some pricing model options we have are:
In summary, whatever pricing model we wish to apply, we must take into account:
In this series of articles we have learned the management of a multi-tenant environment in Azure by going through:
There are more technical and architectural aspects that we must also take into account. You can review all of them in this Microsoft training, “Managing Your Customers in a Multi-Tenant Environment” which has been the most important source of information to develop these articles.