Production Kubernetes

Chapter 12. Multitenancy

When building a production application platform atop Kubernetes, you must consider how to handle the tenants that will run on the platform. As we’ve discussed throughout this book, Kubernetes provides a set of foundational features you can use to implement many requirements. Workload tenancy is no different. Kubernetes offers various knobs you can use to ensure tenants can safely coexist on the same platform. With that said, Kubernetes does not define a tenant. A tenant can be an application, a development team, a business unit, or something else. Defining a tenant is up to you and your organization, and we hope this chapter will help you with that task.

Once you establish who your tenants are, you must determine whether multiple tenants should run on the same platform. In our experience helping large organizations build application platforms, we’ve found that platform teams are usually interested in operating a multitenant platform. With that said, this decision is firmly rooted in the nature of the different tenants and the trust that exists between them. For example, an enterprise offering a shared application platform is a different story than a company offering containers-as-a-service to external customers.

In this chapter, we will first explore the degrees of tenant isolation you can achieve with Kubernetes. The nature of your workloads and your specific requirements will dictate how much isolation you need to provide. The stronger the isolation, ...