Merry Christmas!

My two cents on why multi-tenancy can help save the environment

Yesterday, I was watching a documentary about green solutions in technology, especially in server environments. With issues like global warming and the carbon dioxide emission problem nowadays, any solution which helps us keep this emission as small as possible can contribute to a better environment.

I believe that for software engineering, multi-tenancy is one of the key technologies which can help minimize the CO2 emission. The idea behind this is actually quite simple: in a traditional setup, each customer has his own dedicated resources. For most customers, 80% of these resources will be idle most of the time (based on the Pareto principle). Even though the resources are idle, they are still consuming energy, and therefore producing CO2. Using multi-tenancy, we need fewer resources, while we can increase the utilization of resources we need.

I’m not claiming to be a power management specialist, but I can’t imagine that running 1000 customers on one server consumes more power than having a dedicated server for each one of them. So, the more companies start implementing multi-tenant solutions, the more we, as software engineers, are able to contribute to the CO2 emission problem.