Background Information
aXcelerate completed the Subdomain Migration Project in 2022. At the end of the project, all clients transitioned from sharing one database to smaller groups of clients sharing one database, resulting in 8 shared databases. This was a proactive initiative by aXcelerate to maintain our high standard of reliability, speed, and accessibility for the aXcelerate core system as more users join the aXcelerate community. Since then, some clients have chosen to have their own database.
When a client becomes a single tenant, they are provisioned with their own infrastructure (known internally as a cluster) consisting of their client database, reporting database, the load balancer and their own web server instances, usually 2. This is applicable to both their staging and production environments.
Value Proposition
The key benefit for single-tenancy is a more reliable user experience and performance for aXcelerate’s core system. Primarily, this is due to the removal of the noisy neighbour paradigm. In cloud systems, a noisy neighbour is when one of the clients sharing the same database infrastructure as others, over utilises the shared resources, effectively monopolising access and slowing down API requests for others on the same database. Clients that opt to move to a single tenancy have no neighbours, and hence have full access to their infrastructure, meaning they are not impacted by the actions of others.
An example of this would be when one client runs a very large report against the aXcelerate API, effectively locking out other API calls until the report is complete. This would not occur for a single tenancy, unless of course they ran the report themselves.
Moving to a single-tenancy also offers greater security and privacy. There is a logical and physical partition of data and infrastructure that adds guaranteed security and peace of mind in addition to performance improvements. A dedicated infrastructure ensures that only the client’s traffic passes through. It should be noted however, that even in a multi-tenancy environment, no client has access to any other client’s data, it is simply that they are physically sharing the same infrastructure i.e. single tenancy is just another, physical layer of security.
If performance is a priority, single-tenancy provides uncompromising security, resilience and throughput for the training organisation.
Limitations
There are limitations to single-tenancy. While the services for aXcelerate’s core system like reporting, class enrolment and student data management are on a dedicated infrastructure, the peripheral aXcelerate services like workflow, online assessments, assessment engine, and Turnitin will not be on the client’s own cluster and as such changing to single tenancy has no impact on their performance.
Costs
The cost of having a dedicated cluster will depend on many factors e.g. learner numbers, average requests, number of logins, amount of reporting or workflows, API use etc. A scoping activity will be undertaken before a quote can be provided.
Next Steps
If a training organisation is interested in having its own database, contact aXcelerate support. aXcelerate will evaluate your account and provide further information about the associated cost.
The migration will be an overnight job and aXcelerate will not be accessible via browser, mobile app or API, to the training organisation and their users. The training organisation should take the necessary steps to ensure their users know that aXcelerate services will be unavailable during the migration. This may also affect online bookings through the training organisation’s website, so if possible, the training organisation may wish to disable that functionality during the migration.
aXcelerate will then disable the ability to delete or merge contacts 24 hours prior to the migration.
Once the migration is completed, aXcelerate will re-activate your account and all services will resume as normal the next day.