A tenant is a team, internal group, or external customer using a shared platform while requiring defined access, resource, and operational boundaries. A platform must encode those boundaries and state the guarantees and limitations tenants can expect. section 6.2.1 section 6.2.3
Choose the tenancy boundary according to the isolation and autonomy tenants require:
- Kubernetes Namespaces provide a cheap logical boundary, but require RBAC to restrict visibility and resource quotas to prevent one tenant consuming the cluster. section 6.2.3
- Namespaces still share Kubernetes API endpoints, limiting tenant operations and potentially creating scale or extension-version conflicts. section 6.2.3
- Separate Kubernetes clusters provide full isolation between tenants and allow tenant administrators to install tools and use different scalability or resilience configurations. section 6.2.3
Platform tenancy decision
A platform serving several internal teams first identifies each team’s autonomy and isolation needs, then assigns a namespace or separate cluster boundary and documents the resulting guarantees. section 6.2.1 section 6.2.3
