Multi-tenancy: Individual database per tenant

Question

We are developing a multi-tenant application. With respect to architecture, we have designed shared middle tier for business logic and one database per tenant for data persisten

Answer 1

Another method of restricting the number of connection pools per app server is to use Application Request Routing (ARR) to divide up your tenants and assign them to subsets of the web tier. This lends itself to a more scalable "pod" architecture where a "pod" is a small collection of web/app servers coupled to a subset of the databases. A good article on this approach is here: http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2013/10/31/application-request-routing-in-csf/

If you are building a multi-tenant DB application Azure you should also check-out the new Elastic Scale client libraries that simplify data-dependent routing and facilitate cross-shard queries and management operations. http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/sql-database-elastic-scale-documentation-map/