Multitenancy Scenarios and Usecases

Multitenancy Status Quo (August 2014)

Resources and discussion on MultiTenancy in Sling from the last months:

• Current implementation of Sling Tenant: http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/sling/trunk/contrib/extensions/tenant (no documentation available besides the source code currently)
• Other Wiki pages:
  
  • Multitenancy Support (First draft Felix Meschberger from 2009)
  • Multitenancy Support Integration (proposal from Andreas Schaefer from February 2014)
• Recent discussions in the Mailing list:
  • RT from Carsten Ziegeler: http://apache-sling.73963.n3.nabble.com/RT-Multi-Tenancy-td4037558.html
  • Proposal from Andreas Schaefer: http://apache-sling.73963.n3.nabble.com/Tenant-Implementation-in-Sling-td4031217.html

Definition of terms

Definition of terms used in this wiki page

• Multitenancy
  • The generic description is found in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitenancy
  • The main question is: what exactly is a "Tenant" in context of Sling, and what are the requirements for customization etc. This wiki page should help to shape the answers.
• Content
  • Content accessible via Resources in the Resource Hierarchy (in most cases in a JCR content repository) which belongs to each tenant
  • Is stored by convention below /content/*, but this is not mandatory
  • May be associated via resource types with scripts and components globally available, or tenant-specific custom scripts
• Configuration
  • Configuration that customizes the system and application behavior
  • Either globally, or on a more fine-granular level (e.g. per tenant)
  • OSGi configurations are part of it, but there may be other configuration as well
• Scripts
  • Scripts like JSP/ESP/Sightly/Java files stored as resources in the resource hierarchy that are used by Sling to render the views of the resources
  • Ca be both globally available (stored in /libs or /apps), or tenant-specifc
• Bundles
  • Java bundles containing services deployed to the OSGI runtime
  • Usually bundles are always global, not tenant-specific. But configuration may be needed to be tenant-specific as well, which is currently only possible if the bundle implementation supports it.
• Site
  • A site is a collection/subtree of resources of the content that forms a logical unit used to publish a CMS-based site
  • The root of the subtree may be the homepage, with the subnodes forming the content hierarchy of the site
  • Usually there is a need for site-specific configuration

Scenarios

After reviewing the discussions in the mailing lists there seem to be two major usecases that have the need for a Multitenancy support. Although there have some shared requirements, both have a set of special requirements with some complexity to implement that are not so relevant for the other.

// TODO

Usecases

// TODO