Is Google drive a good example for multi-tenant application?

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By definition (Wikipedia) - A tenant is a group of users who share a common access with specific privileges to the software instance and the term "software multi-tenancy" refers to a software architecture in which a single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants. It also states that with a multi-tenant architecture, a software application is designed to provide every tenant a dedicated share of the instance - including its data, configuration, user management, tenant individual functionality and non-functional properties.

From the definition, I understand that multi-tenancy says more from an architecture perspective and in case of Google drive, the internal architecture may not be known. However from a user/usage view, can we call Google drive or similar cloud applications as perfect examples for multi-tenancy since these are able to serve multiple customers and even allows us to share data among users securely? If so, will it be correct in saying that any software or application with a single instance allowing multiple users and gives data isolation, called as multi-tenant applications (from a user perspective)?

Note - I have already gone through the following post which states the difference between multi-user and multi-tenancy, however most of the cloud application share same database and servers and so can we call them multi-tenant? - http://multi-tenancy.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-does-this-mean-part-i.html

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multi-tenant

2 Answers

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Multi-user example:

Multi-tenant example:

A multi-user system need not necessarily mean it's a multi-tenant system.

As you mentioned, we may not know the internal architecture of Google Drive, but from a user's view, it can be considered as a multi-tenant application as users from multiple domains/business entities/companies (i.e., [email protected] and [email protected]) access the same application using Google's enterprise solutions. Each of those domains/companies can be considered as tenants of Google Drive.

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Google Drive is an excellent example of a multi-tenant application when several users have access to one cloud drive and can have access to this drive. For example, to perform some kind of teamwork. In this case, each user of Google Drive will be a tenant. The work with Google Drive's documents has a similar logic. Few users that have access to documents can jointly use them.