Multi-tenant SaaS partitioning models for PostgreSQL

The best method for accomplishing multi-tenancy depends on the requirements for your SaaS application. The following sections demonstrate partitioning models for successfully implementing multi-tenancy in PostgreSQL.

Note

The models discussed in this section are applicable to both Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible. References to PostgreSQL in this section apply to both services.

There are three high-level models that you can use in PostgreSQL for SaaS partitioning: silo, bridge, and pool. The following image summarizes the trade-offs between the silo and pool models. The bridge model is a hybrid of the silo and pool models.

Partitioning model	Advantages	Disadvantages
Silo	Compliance alignment No cross-tenant impact Tenant-level tuning Tenant-level availability	Compromised agility No centralized management Deployment complexity Cost
Pool	Agility Cost optimization Centralized management Simplified deployment	Cross-tenant impact Compliance challenges All or nothing availability
Bridge	Some compliance alignment Agility Cost optimization Centralized management	Some compliance challenges All or nothing availability (mostly) Cross-tenant impact Deployment complexity

The following sections discuss each model in more detail.

Partitioning models:

• PostgreSQL silo model
• PostgreSQL pool model
• PostgreSQL bridge model
• Decision matrix