Beyond multitenancy: Introducing a new container-based application factory

Although it's a classical approach, multitenancy at the application level comes with limitations in terms of processing isolation, efficient hardware utilization, and advanced per-tenant configuration. Mariana Cedica demonstrates Nuxeo's new container-based approachpowered by dynamic Docker containers, CoreOS, Fleet, and Gogetathat avoids common issues with traditional multitenancy.

Although it’s a classical approach, multitenancy at the application level comes with limitations in terms of processing isolation, efficient hardware utilization, and advanced per-tenant configuration. Mariana Cedica demonstrates Nuxeo’s new container-based approach—powered by dynamic Docker containers, CoreOS, Fleet, and Gogeta—that avoids common issues with traditional multitenancy. Mariana offers a new application-factory infrastructure, using customized Docker containers deployed on demand for each tenant, built to avoid the limitations of multitenancy while still being able to be managed as a single application. Mariana describes the design choices her team made and explains how they built this infrastructure. She also explores how Nuxeo uses it in production to deliver the Nuxeo.io services and how this container-based application factory model optimizes the hosting costs by providing high-density container hosting on top of AWS EC2 and passivation/on-demand activation of dataless containers.