Multitenancy and Meteor

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3

I’ve x-posted to Reddit, and there’s been some good discussion. Since I originally posted, I had re-considered my architecture. Ultimately, having client-specific builds seems to carry more baggage then benefit. With pure multitenancy, release management is simpler and architecturally far more cost efficient.

So we’ve had to make a couple changes to support multiple tenants with a shared database and application instance. There have been two key pieces for my multitenancy implementation:

  1. The definition of a Tenant collection to store tenant-specific metadata (with each associated collection storing a tenantId), and

  2. Publication overloading (e.g., putting dynamic content in the publication name) based off of the tenantId.

var tenants = Tenants.find();
tenants.observeChanges({
      added: function (tenantId, tenant) {
        Meteor.publish("someOtherCollection-" + tenantId, function () {
          return SomeOtherCollection.find({tenantId: tenantId});
        });
      }
});

This is much different from:

Meteor.publish("someOtherCollection", function (tenantId) {
  return SomeOtherCollection.find({tenantId: tenantId});
});

Because you won’t be able to simultaneously view two tenant instances. Your subscriptions will collide and things will get weird.