Multi-Tenancy
An architecture where a single application instance serves multiple isolated customers or organizations.
Definition
Multi-tenancy is a software architecture in which a single deployed instance of an application, along with its underlying infrastructure, serves multiple distinct customers or organizations, called tenants, while keeping each tenant's data and configuration logically separated. This contrasts with single tenant architecture, where each customer runs on its own dedicated instance. Multi-tenancy is what allows a platform to support many organizations without provisioning and operating a separate copy of the software for each one.
How it works
Every piece of data, and every action a user takes, is associated with a tenant identifier, and the application enforces that a request scoped to one tenant cannot read or modify another tenant's resources. This scoping is typically applied consistently across the data layer, the authorization checks, and the user interface, so a user who belongs to a tenant only ever sees that tenant's projects, credentials, and history. Some systems allow a single user account to belong to multiple tenants and switch between them, which requires the application to make the active tenant explicit in every request rather than assuming a fixed context.
Why it matters for AI agent systems
An agent platform used by multiple teams or organizations needs strict tenant isolation so that one tenant's agents, prompts, credentials, and generated data are never visible to another tenant, even though they run on shared infrastructure. This matters particularly for credentials and conversation history, which can contain sensitive business information that an agent processed on a tenant's behalf. Agenhood is multi-tenant from the ground up: every resource is scoped to a workspace, and a user can belong to several workspaces and switch between them through a header picker, with roles applied independently in each one.
Multi-tenancy vs tenant
Multi-tenancy describes the architecture of the system as a whole. A tenant is one of the individual organizations or accounts that architecture isolates and serves. The two terms are closely related but describe different levels: one is a design property of the platform, the other is a unit within it.
Related concepts
- Tenant: the isolated unit that multi-tenancy protects.
- Role-based access control: typically applied within the scope of a single tenant.