Architecture
Ownership
In Capsule, we introduce a new persona called the Tenant Owner. The goal is to enable Cluster Administrators to delegate tenant management responsibilities to Tenant Owners. Here’s how it works:
Tenant Owners: They manage the namespaces within their tenants and perform administrative tasks confined to their tenant boundaries. This delegation allows teams to operate more autonomously while still adhering to organizational policies.Cluster Administrators: They provision tenants, essentially determining the size and resource allocation of each tenant within the entire cluster. Think of it as defining how big each piece of cake (Tenant) should be within the whole cake (Cluster).
Capsule provides robust tools to strictly enforce tenant boundaries, ensuring that each tenant operates within its defined limits. This separation of duties promotes both security and efficient resource management.
Key Decisions
Introducing a new separation of duties can lead to a significant paradigm shift. This has technical implications and may also impact your organizational structure. Therefore, when designing a multi-tenant platform pattern, carefully consider the following aspects. As Cluster Administrator, ask yourself:
- 🔑 How much ownership can be delegated to Tenant Owners (Platform Users)?
The answer to this question may be influenced by the following aspects:
Are the Cluster Adminsitrators willing to grant permissions to Tenant Owners?
- You might have a problem with know-how and probably your organisation is not yet pushing Kubernetes itself enough as a key strategic plattform. The key here is enabling Plattform Users through good UX and know-how transfers
Who is responsible for the deployed workloads within the Tenants??
- If Platform Administrators are still handling this, a true “shift left” has not yet been achieved.
Who gets paged during a production outage within a Tenant’s application??
- You’ll need robust monitoring that enables Tenant Owners to clearly understand and manage what’s happening inside their own tenant.
Are your customers technically capable of working directly with the Kubernetes API??
- If not, you may need to build a more user-friendly platform with better UX — for example, a multi-tenant ArgoCD setup, or UI layers like Headlamp.
Layouts
Let’s dicuss different Tenant Layouts which could be used . These are just approaches we have seen, however you might also find a combination of these which fits your use-case.
Tenant As A Service
With this approach you essentially just provide your Customers with the Tenant on your cluster. The rest is their responsability. This concludes to a shared responsibility model. This can be achieved when also the Tenant Owners are responsible for everything they are provisiong within their Tenant’s namespaces.
Scheduling
Workload distribution across your compute infrastructure can be approached in various ways, depending on your specific priorities. Regardless of the use case, it’s essential to preserve maximum flexibility for your platform administrators. This means ensuring that:
- Nodes can be drained or deleted at any time.
- Cluster updates can be performed at any time.
- The number of worker nodes can be scaled up or down as needed.
If your cluster architecture prevents any of these capabilities, or if certain applications block the enforcement of these policies, you should reconsider your approach.
Dedicated
Strong tenant isolation, ensuring that any noisy neighbor effects remain confined within individual tenants (tenant responsibility). This approach may involve higher administrative overhead and costs compared to shared compute. It also provides enhanced security by dedicating nodes to a single customer/application. It is recommended, at a minimum, to separate the cluster’s operator workload from customer workloads.
Shared
With this approach you share the nodes amongst all Tenants, therefor giving you more potential for optimizing resources on a node level. It’s a common pattern to separate the controllers needed to power your Distribution (operators) form the actual workload. This ensures smooth operations for the cluster
Overview:
- ✅ Designed for cost efficiency .
- ✅ Suitable for applications that typically experience low resource fluctuations and run with multiple replicas.
- ❌ Not ideal for applications that are not cloud-native ready, as they may adversely affect the operation of other applications or the maintenance of node pools.
- ❌ Not ideal if strong isolation is required
We provide the concept of ResourcePools to manage resources cross namespaces. There’s some further aspects you must think about with shared approaches: