Tenant
Using Tenants in DuploCloud
In GCP, cloud features such as Resource Groups, Identity and Access Management (IAM), Security Groups, Cloud KMS, as well as Kubernetes Namespaces, are exposed in Tenants which reference their configurations.
When you create Tenants in an Infrastructure, a namespace is created in the Kubernetes cluster with the name duploservices-TENANT_NAME.
At the logical level, the Tenant is:
A Container of resources: All resources (except ones corresponding to the Infrastructure) are created within the Tenant. If a tenant is deleted, all the resources in the Tenant are terminated.
A Security Boundary: All resources within a Tenant can talk to each other. For example, a Docker container deployed in a GKE instance within the tenant will have access to Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud databases within the same tenant. SQL database instances in another tenant cannot be reached, for example, by default. Tenants expose endpoints to each other using load balancers or explicit inter-Tenant security groups and identity management policies.
User Access Control: Self-service is the bedrock of the DuploCloud platform. To that end, users can be granted Tenant level access. For example, John and Jim are developers who can be granted access to the DEV01 tenant, Joe is an administrator who has access to all tenants, and Anna is a data scientist who has access only to the DATASCI tenant.
A Billing Unit: Because the Tenant is a container of resources, all resources in the Tenant are tagged with the Tenant's name in the cloud provider, making it easy to segregate usage by Tenant.
A mechanism for alerting: All alerts represent Faults in any resource within the Tenants.
A mechanism for logging: Each Tenant has its unique set of logs.
A mechanism for metrics: Each Tenant has its unique set of metrics.
Tenant use cases
DuploCloud customers usually create at least two Tenants for their production and non-production cloud environments (Infrastructures).
You can map Tenants in each or all of your development, testing, staging, Quality Assurance (QA), and production environments.
For example:
Production Infrastructure
Pre-production Tenant - for preparing or reviewing production code
Production Tenant - for deploying tested code
Non-production Infrastructure
Development Tenant - for writing and reviewing code
Quality Assurance Tenant - for automated testing
In larger organizations, some customers create Tenants based on application environments, such as creating a tenant for Data Science applications, another for web applications, etc.
Tenants are sometimes created to isolate a single customer workload, allowing more granular performance monitoring, scaling flexibility, or tighter security. This is referred to as a single-Tenant setup. In this case, a DuploCloud Tenant maps to an environment used exclusively by the end client.
When you have a large set of applications that different teams access, it is helpful to map Tenants to team workloads. For example, you could create Tenants for Dev-analytics, Stage-analytics, and so on.
Tenant abstraction and isolation
While Infrastructure provides abstraction and isolation at the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Kubernetes/cluster level, the Tenant supplies the next level of isolation implemented in GKS by segregating Tenants using the following construct per Tenant
A set of security groups
An identity management role and profile
A Kubernetes Namespace, a read-only service account, and a write service account
Cloud KMS
PEM file
GKS Worker nodes or virtual machines (VMs) created within a Tenant are given a label with the Tenant Name, as are the node selectors and namespaces. Consequently, even at the worker node level, two tenants achieve complete isolation and independence, even though they may be sharing the same Kubernetes cluster by a shared Infrastructure
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