Description
Multi tenancy at massive scale is hard, especially for a company like Atlassian. For example, it runs a high-concurrency, multi-tenant platform (Forge) where noisy neighbors, schema churn, and data residency are constant realities.
In this TiDB SCaiLE 2025 keynote, Atlassian Senior Principal Software Engineer Sergey Mineyev dives into what it really takes to run multi-tenancy for millions of tenants in high-compliance SaaS environments. From Atlassian’s reality (3M+ tenants, 700+ plugins, 800-table schemas) to why shared, silo, and hybrid multi tenancy each break in different ways, you’ll discover what actually works when the stakes are enterprise-grade.
Sergey explains why per-tenant requirements—BYOK encryption (customer-managed keys), data residency migrations, per-tenant backup/restore, workload and security isolation—push typical architectures past their limits. You’ll see a comparison of shared multi-tenancy vs. silo (database-per-tenant) vs. hybrid multi-tenancy, including the “metadata explosion,” connection management, and sharding/bin-packing challenges that appear at millions of databases.
Finally, find out how TiDB’s architecture came to the rescue: multi-master compute, ultra-lightweight sessions for huge connection counts, and a horizontally scalable metadata cache (v2) that only loads what active tenants need. You’ll hear about real fixes that mattered in production—faster DDL pipeline throughput (~6–7k DDL/min), improved node initialization, BR backup/restore stability, and region-tuning—plus the fleet impact of consolidating over 700 PostgreSQL instances down to a small number of resilient TiDB clusters.
You’ll learn:
- When to choose shared vs. silo vs. hybrid multi tenancy, and their operational trade-offs
- How to meet BYOK, data residency, and per-tenant restore SLOs without runaway cost
- Why connection management and metadata scale are the silent killers of multi tenancy
- How a control-plane/data-plane mindset improves isolation, compliance, and uptime
Speaker
Sergey Mineyev
Senior Principal Software Engineer, Atlassian
