Instance per DB or single instance for all DBs?

[Yair Sappir]

Hi there,

Can anyone help me figure out what would be better: 

1. Multiple instances, one per DB

or

2. Single large instance which will hold multiple DBs inside

My scenario is similar to Jira Cloud where each customer has his own Jira Cloud server, with its own DB. 

Our product is similar in that way, where each of our customers has their own instance with its own DB. 

Now the question is, will it be better to manage all of the users' DBs in 1 large instance, or to have a DB instance for each customer? 

What would be the cons and pros for the chosen alternative? 

The first thing that came to or minds is backup management - Will we be able to recover a specific customer DB if it resides on the same large instance as all other DBs? We couldn't quite figure that out.

Thanks for helping out,

Yair

[George (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hello Yair, 

Using alternative 2 with one large instance for all your users has certain advantages, but you should be aware of disadvantages such as: 

- Everyone uses the same DBMS version. 

- An upgrade means all users are off, not one or two. 

- All users enjoy equal quality of access, in case of different usage patterns, and throttling is problematic. 

- Users should ideally use the same version of your app. 

- Economies of scale are more difficult to implement. 

This discussion group is oriented more towards general opinions, trends, and issues of general nature touching the app engine. For coding and programming architecture, you may be better served in dedicated forums such as stackoverflow, where experienced programmers are within reach and ready to help.

[Yair Sappir]

Thank you very much George!

Following your advice, I've posted the question on StackOverflow as well: instance-per-db-or-single-instance-for-all-dbs