►Q◄ for those who have Multi Tenants App runnig.

BenHayat

Hi guys;

As I started adding new security and safety features into my app before getting it out in the open, I want to get your opinions on the following questions and I like to get a sense how you guys approach it to safeguard your app and resources.
NOTE: My Multi tenant app uses ONE database to store all tenants data.

Q:
a) How do you go about monitoring and controlling each user's data growth?
b) Do you lock the user up to so many records they create?
c) How do you block a user if trying to do harm to your system by creating large volume of data?
d) What proactive measures do you take to make sure users can not overload the system?

I know each app is different, but I think sharing your experience and designs could shed light for everyone to look into it.
Also, I'm sure I didn't ask all the questions related to safeguarding your app, feel free to bring up your points of view.

Please keep the comments relative to the subject, so everyone can benefit from the comments. No hijacking please!!!

BenHayat

Any thoughts on this subject?

kklosson

The answer to most of your questions is "it depends". My multi-tenant app allows users to upload documents but I limit the upload size to 5 MB. I suppose if a key aspect of your app is the ability to store documents, then you need to provide the storage. The user/customer will expect at least 5GB of storage for their use. On item d), I'm not sure if you mean performance-wise or storage-wise. If you have processor and/or memory-intensive processes, you need to give this some thought in your design. Some apps, with extensive reporting or computational requirements, may require architectures that transcend what AwareIM is really designed to do. All things are possible, but you will be blazing a new trail in the AwareIM realm. One thing that would help would be if AwareIM's scheduling feature could be set to minutes. Process-extensive functions could be queued so that only one such process is occurring at a time, presuming that's a reasonable solution.

Lastly, I don't think multi-tenant is really the issue. Any app can have these problems. But right off, you may want to consider stand-alone instances per account if that can work for you. Sooner or later, you will want to tie the user's resource requirements to their fee.

BenHayat

kklosson wrote
The answer to most of your questions is "it depends". My multi-tenant app allows users to upload documents but I limit the upload size to 5 MB. I suppose if a key aspect of your app is the ability to store documents, then you need to provide the storage. The user/customer will expect at least 5GB of storage for their use. On item d), I'm not sure if you mean performance-wise or storage-wise. If you have processor and/or memory-intensive processes, you need to give this some thought in your design. Some apps, with extensive reporting or computational requirements, may require architectures that transcend what AwareIM is really designed to do. All things are possible, but you will be blazing a new trail in the AwareIM realm. One thing that would help would be if AwareIM's scheduling feature could be set to minutes. Process-extensive functions could be queued so that only one such process is occurring at a time, presuming that's a reasonable solution.

Lastly, I don't think multi-tenant is really the issue. Any app can have these problems. But right off, you may want to consider stand-alone instances per account if that can work for you. Sooner or later, you will want to tie the user's resource requirements to their fee.

Thank you for your thoughts. I'm on the same path as you had described, which is a good sign.
My app being multi tenant, is a special case where tenants are and are not independent. In some case the tenant inter relate with each other and in other ways they are independent. So, it's like a large building of lawyers, doctors and labs that communicate and utilize each other, and yet each office is independent. Just a simple analogy.

On the (d) part, I meant data volume and # of records. I have to come up with some reasonable numbers to set as the limit how much data they can create.

This has been a great exercise to build certain security into the system that monitors the actions and data growth of each account.