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For right now? Serious answer? Cloud Foundry. Pretty much everything you need to do today is done. Multitenancy was designed in from the start and is availabl

For right now? Serious answer? Cloud Foundry. Pretty much everything you need to do today is done. Multitenancy was designed in from the start and is available in several levels of hardness (orgs/spaces gives you user-level multitenancy, isolation segments give you component-level multitenancy, multi-foundation gives you the equivalent of multi-cluster multitenancy). As time goes on it will adopt more and more of Kubernetes, Istio and other systems as they emerge and become able to take over from its own original components. But you'll get the same experience throughout. And Kubernetes will converge upwards as people realise that "It Just Works" is actually, you know, a pretty nice developer experience. But I am, having worked on and around Cloud Foundry for several years, hilariously biased.

Terretta 7y ago
Instead of K8s or Cloud Foundry, a practical “alternative, to really achieve multi-tenancy” might be: - Since essentially no container platform was designed for hard multi-tenancy, use automation to stand up separate copies of a platform at scale, using a platform with low overhead in controller to worker nodes. Consider what would be the “simplest thing that could possibly work” e.g. offering tenants an AWS autoscale group (with appropriate IAM account, user, role, security group perms) behind an AWS PrivateLink endpoint: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/endpoint-service.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/endpoint-se... I say that, because most of these platforms weren’t intended for and are not marketed for hard multi-tenancy, until their engineers started getting asked the question by enterprises attempting it for regulatory/compliance/security reasons. > Cloud Foundry. Multitenancy was designed in from the start... This comment gives me pause, as CloudFoundry’s security model, approach, and engineering lacked hardness as of 3 - 4 years ago. We explored the multi-tenancy design, and found no guarantees, or even strong assurances, were brought by the platform. The larger issue was we found CF’s security engineering assertions rather overconfident (flavor of the comment above). Warranted relative to other solutions without security features, but not relative to being hardened enough to trust in the face of bad actors, particularly malicious insiders. My opinion is also “biased”, in the sense that unless a platform is doing work outside of “the server”, I don’t believe it can offer hard multi-tenancy. Here’s an example of work outside the server: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2019/02/aws-nitro-system/ https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2019/02/aws-nitro-system/
- Turbots 7y ago
  I think Pivotal Web Service (the online, SaaS version of Pivotal Cloud Foundry) is the finest example of multitenancy working on Cloud Foundry. I also know that Cloud Foundry is being used by lots of government organisations, including the US Airforce. If you want multitenancy on Kubernetes, the easiest solution is to just spin up separate clusters for your tenants (if you size the master nodes small enough, it can still be cost effective depending on your needs). In that case, just go for PKS (Pivotal Container Service) which manages, scales, patches and upgrades your clusters from one single management plane, which is quite handy considering 4 major releases and tens of patch versions are released each year.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  Well, 3 years is a long time (though some of your concerns may still be valid). That said, the point of comparison is between the two platforms as they are today. > unless a platform is doing work outside of “the server”, I don’t believe it can offer hard multi-tenancy. I admire the work AWS and others are doing to harden the hardware base, but I'm not sure how software would contribute or not contribute to that line of defence.

Terretta 7y ago

Instead of K8s or Cloud Foundry, a practical “alternative, to really achieve multi-tenancy” might be: - Since essentially no container platform was designed for hard multi-tenancy, use automation to stand up separate copies of a platform at scale, using a platform with low overhead in controller to worker nodes. Consider what would be the “simplest thing that could possibly work” e.g. offering tenants an AWS autoscale group (with appropriate IAM account, user, role, security group perms) behind an AWS PrivateLink endpoint: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/endpoint-service.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/endpoint-se... I say that, because most of these platforms weren’t intended for and are not marketed for hard multi-tenancy, until their engineers started getting asked the question by enterprises attempting it for regulatory/compliance/security reasons. > Cloud Foundry. Multitenancy was designed in from the start... This comment gives me pause, as CloudFoundry’s security model, approach, and engineering lacked hardness as of 3 - 4 years ago. We explored the multi-tenancy design, and found no guarantees, or even strong assurances, were brought by the platform. The larger issue was we found CF’s security engineering assertions rather overconfident (flavor of the comment above). Warranted relative to other solutions without security features, but not relative to being hardened enough to trust in the face of bad actors, particularly malicious insiders. My opinion is also “biased”, in the sense that unless a platform is doing work outside of “the server”, I don’t believe it can offer hard multi-tenancy. Here’s an example of work outside the server: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2019/02/aws-nitro-system/ https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2019/02/aws-nitro-system/

Turbots 7y ago
I think Pivotal Web Service (the online, SaaS version of Pivotal Cloud Foundry) is the finest example of multitenancy working on Cloud Foundry. I also know that Cloud Foundry is being used by lots of government organisations, including the US Airforce. If you want multitenancy on Kubernetes, the easiest solution is to just spin up separate clusters for your tenants (if you size the master nodes small enough, it can still be cost effective depending on your needs). In that case, just go for PKS (Pivotal Container Service) which manages, scales, patches and upgrades your clusters from one single management plane, which is quite handy considering 4 major releases and tens of patch versions are released each year.
jacques_chester 7y ago
Well, 3 years is a long time (though some of your concerns may still be valid). That said, the point of comparison is between the two platforms as they are today. > unless a platform is doing work outside of “the server”, I don’t believe it can offer hard multi-tenancy. I admire the work AWS and others are doing to harden the hardware base, but I'm not sure how software would contribute or not contribute to that line of defence.