hello everyone, my name is Mohammed Waqas and I am a lead technical product manager at QALY I have an experience of more than eight years in the product management industry. primarily I am a software engineer. and I've done my post graduation in management. So I've transformed myself to a product manager for the past six years now. And, I'm quite excited to present this topic at this amazing conference, Conf 42 2025. so let's start, let's jump right in. So today I'm going to talk about how you can optimize your product, your businesses, and your methodology of product management using multi tenancy architecture. I will be sharing some strategies and some insights around how businesses. can transform themselves from traditional architecture to multi tenancy architecture and save tremendous cost when you have to scale to hundreds of thousands of users and you do not have to spend on every single customer when you have to onboard them. So let's dive right in. so what is multi tenancy architecture? It is the architecture where multiple customers All tenants, in this case, share a single infrastructure while maintaining data isolation. This is very important that they maintain their own data isolation. I'm going to talk more about that. but, it, this architecture basically enhances scalability, cost efficiency, and operational effectiveness, if obviously it is incorporated properly. Moving on, just a bit of a graphical representation of how a single tenant versus multi tenant looks like. So if you see on the left, you have multiple customers, customer 1, customer 2, and customer 3, and they all share their separate instances and their separate databases. But if you see on the multi tenant structure, you have three customers who share the similar interfaces, similar instances, and they all share single databases. but their own isolated frameworks, which is something that I'm going to talk later as well. So this is how graphically it looks and even if you see on the picture, you can see how we are cutting down three instances to one just in the case of having three customers. Now imagine having hundreds and thousands of customers. potential costs when you move from single tenant to multi tenant. the key benefits of this entire infrastructure is extremely lower costs, easier maintenance and updates, and faster scaling. Now, if I can take this moment here to talk more about how you can make it easier to maintain, make easier updates, and faster scaling, but keeping your data isolation. So basically when you have so let's take an example, okay, you have a product that is Let's say an erp for example And you have to deploy the exact same functionalities for 20, 000 customers with the exact same functionalities, but their own white labeled themes or their own logos or their own color grading. in, instead of deploying this entire software on multiple AWS EC2 instances, for example, what you can do is you can potentially keep your entire code base in one instance. And then what you can do is you can keep On the database side, I'm not going to go deep on the technicalities of the database security, but you can easily make database isolations using AWS databases as well, so that you can protect the data for each customer. Now what you're doing is, every time a new customer comes in, all you do is, you just create the separate database or a data isolation pocket for your new customer, but they all share the same instance and you can do horizontal scaling for your set, Instance basically that you have for your code base and then it automatically scales when you have more customers that the server cannot handle, but you're not spinning up separate instances every time a new customer is onboarded. So what it does is it actually saves you tons of cost. However, it has its own challenges, which I'm going to talk a bit later on, but now I'm going to talk about a few case studies that I personally saw, happening in the industry. One of the companies is called Grandstream. They had their tenant setup, which was a single tenant setup. Every time a new client is onboarded, they had to spend almost 232 hours to set up a new instance, to set up the entire infrastructure, to set up all the configurations, and it was extremely high operational cost. so what they did is they basically migrated their entire instances to multi tenancy. Resulting in new tenant setup time to be from 232 hours to 106 hours. They migrated the clients in less than 76 hours. The bug fix time is very crucial because now you're not fixing bug on hundreds of thousands of different instances. You're just fixing bug in one instance and rolling it out to all your clients. So what this does is it may maintain your bug fix time from five hours to let's say one and two and a half hours. And this is extremely optimized when you're talking about scale. So obviously the investment, is a separate topic. But the one thing that I found online is that they, they had huge monetary uplift whilst they migrated as well. talking a bit about Salesforce as well, they had similar structure, they had single tenant system, they migrated to the multi tenant, they have not shared any, figures for their, for their changes, but because a company of that magnitude. If they are moving from single tenant to multi tenant, you can understand the importance and the benefits of this architecture is. some of the companies, Shopify, did, the transformation from single tenant to multi tenant as well. if you imagine Shopify, it's just a single functionality where you can set up multiple stores. Now they have a similar mindset that, hey, if you have one instance, we have multiple shops. And we have similar functionalities for all the shops. Why not keep it multi tenant? That's a few examples of how people have actually migrated from single tenancy to multi tenancy. And they've had huge uplifts in revenues. They have huge cost savings, optimizations, less time in bug fixing, more, flexibility in scaling, and obviously some great long term benefits as well. one more example, sorry, it's Uber. Uber again did the same thing. If you see, Uber had multiple products, multiple, restaurants, if you talk about Uber Eats, using similar architecture. So they did the same, and again. You can clearly understand that a name like Uber, if they are going multi tenant, again, stresses the value. if I'm going to, to basically move to quickly and the key benefits is I've already talked more about, on the fast onboarding and scaling, but operational simplification, reduced complexity, cost efficiency through shared resources are just a few benefits of moving from single tenancy to multi tenancy. But it do has its challenges. Sometimes, there's a concept of security and data isolation risk as well, but now with this modern infrastructure and modern data security architectures, it has been proven that you can put up huge, Sorry, more detailed, data security parameters. And this risk is now slowly and gradually being mitigated because this was a huge risk for any big player to move to multi-tenancy. But now I've seen that, there are a lot of solutions that basically encrypt the data end to end, and it's very easy to avoid this risk in the scalable architecture. There are some performance management, and user allocation issues. there are some scaling issues as well, but I've seen again that, every single cloud provider is now providing extremely beneficial solutions to tackle these problems as well. again, balancing tenant customization with simplicity is quite crucial. because as I said, you are now managing one single, instance, basically. Now, the benefits are huge, but if, if you don't have a fallback solution, if you don't have a proper backup solution, then it can become a huge problem as well. as I said, it looks easy, it sounds good, but it requires proper planning, proper arrangement, and proper resources to basically migrate from single tenancy to multi tenancy. best practices I would say is again just from my own experiences is you have to make sure that your data security is absolutely top notch. This is absolutely something that no no customer basically will compromise on, you have to optimize performance. You have to be very crucial when it comes to your backups. You have to be very crucial when it comes to best practices, both for front end and for backend and for DevOps as well. You have to be very sure to have a proper backend management solution for user role based access and feature flags. Feature flagging is very crucial now because now you are managing. One single instance and you have hundreds of thousands of clients. You have to make sure your feature flags are properly implemented because sometimes in some businesses you might want one feature to just be available for a few customers. You need to make sure your feature flags are properly managed, properly optimized and that you have properly implemented that in your code base as well. You can also use third party solutions for feature flags but that's something that is a business. decision and a product decision. the future of multi tenancy is pretty simple. I think, with the data security, solutions out there, with the scalable optimization solutions out there, I don't think any large scale solution can operate without the concept of multi tenancy. It's very crucial that you understand and evaluate the importance of this at An early stage. the key takeaways I would say is that it's a game changer it's not new. It's very old, but now it's getting mature with data protection policies with the end to end encryption And I think the case studies clearly shows how it's very important for any business to understand this architecture. Thank you so much for your time. And, I'm really glad that I get to make this talk and, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. and I'll obviously. share my details, with the conference organizers. So if you need, that obviously let me know, find me on LinkedIn and I'll make sure to accept your requests and answer any questions that you want. Thank you so much. Have a nice day. Bye bye.