If we had started Unleash just a few years earlier, we would not have been able to scale private instances like we have.
This is because platforms like Kubernetes empowers Unleash to efficiently sandbox customers. And as managed Kubernetes matures, this sandboxing becomes easier and easier to run.
This significantly brought down the cost of choosing single tenant private instances over multi-tenant solutions. It changed the calculus, especially when you bring in all the benefits of single tenancy.
In this way, single tenant private instances have shifted from an outdated way of doing things, to the future.
Ten years ago it would have been nonsensical to choose single tenant. It would have been seen as a step backwards.
A focus on private instances is not for everybody, particularly for B2C companies.
While we can do more today, there is obviously a cap on how many customers we can do this with. We’re nowhere near that limit, and newer technologies could make this even more scalable over time. But for a B2C company with millions of tenants, private instances probably wouldn’t make sense just yet.
It's interesting that we often want to run the databases our-self. Even I thought that was a good idea for a while, but learned the hard way all the work we needed to invest in this.
We often underestimate the total cost of taking care of the database our-self, I did as well (patches, upgrades, backups, scaling) compared to managed services.