Multitenancy and Observability in Smart City Platforms

Abstract

Smart City Platforms are complex Information and Communication (ICT) projects where information from the physical and virtual world converge with the ultimate goal to provide better living conditions to the city’s citizens. The architecture of these platforms has been approached as an evolution of similarly large ICT projects and as a consequence the already established architectural patterns have been reused. Among them is multitenancy, a software architecture pattern that emerged in an effort to optimize the use of compute resources and minimize the operational cost of large-scale deployments. At the same time, the size and complexity of Smart City Platforms makes observability one of the key capabilities a Smart City Platform must offer in order to ensure its operational requirements are met. From the perspective of system complexity in general and observability in particular, the applicability of the multitenancy architecture pattern in Smart City Platforms is debatable as the benefits it brings may not outweigh the challenges.