What is the difference between multi-tenancy and multi-user solutions?

Question

I believe I understand this in terms of hardware, where multiple individuals 'share' the same processing and memory for their solutions. But I've been looking at gmail and facebook, are those multi-tenanted solutions? Is it that as long as my solution can support multiple users, its multi-tenanted?

Answer 1

You can read this post concerning your question.

Multi-tenant vs multi-user
Any system may have multiple users. In a multi-user system multiple users can use the application (e.g. Exact Synergy). The term multi-user does not imply anything for the architecture of the system. On the other hand, while a multi-tenant system is a multi-user system, multi-tenancy tells us something about the architecture of the system: namely that multiple users share the same application and database instance. Note that it is possible to have a multi-user system, which is not multi-tenant.