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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

What does single-tenant SaaS even mean? All of your company's data will be in a separate AWS account? Isolated Kuberentes cluster? Individual RDS instance? And how are you ensuring that the cloud provider you rely on is also single tenant? It is a meaningless term unless the service describes exactly how they are isolating customers (And it doesn't seem like they are in this post). In my experience the term is just used by salespeople to assure paranoid CIOs and nothing else.

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> What does single-tenant SaaS even mean?

I'll attempt to explain to clarify my own understanding.

SaaS is a delivery mechanism. Tenancy is an isolation model. To your broader point, the isolation model is implementation specific.

Multi-tenant SaaS means a single deployment for all tenants, and the data is delivered over the internet.

Single-tenant SaaS means a separate deployment for each tenant. I think common usage means a separate database per tenant. Single-tenant can also include entirely new infra for each tenant with private networking which is what Gitlab describes.

HN thread on single-tenant DB experiences with lots of useful tidbits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23305111

The press release says customers can pick the cloud and region they want to use so I suspect the answer will be 'yes' for those questions.

A ~1000 person company I'm familiar with moved from GitHub to a self hosted GitHub because it was too easy for engineers to hit a button and accidentally publish a repository/gist to the public. That shouldn't matter, but sometimes it does. I'm not sure if that's the same on GitLab.

Sure but you can offer that with multi-tenant deployments in different regions.

They're specifically saying it's single tenant. I suspect this is the same software as a self hosted GitLab, but where GitLab is operating it.

GitLab.com is a multi-tenant deployment.

GitLab Dedicated is for customers who want GitLab team to manage GitLab for them but not on GitLab.com

(I work there)

Hi, GitLab team member here :)

GitLab has some project visibility settings that you can utilize to control visibility and prevent users from publishing repos to the public: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/public_access.html#restrict-...

Alternatively, private groups can only have private projects: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/public_access.html#private-p...

Good to know, thx!

Usually means each customer gets their own DB and instance of the app. This is a pretty good protection against a software bug from reading another customers data.

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