When we set out to build BrokerVu, one of the earliest and most important architectural decisions was multi-tenancy. We needed a system that could serve hundreds of brokers on a single platform while keeping each broker's data completely isolated.
Why multi-tenancy?
The alternative — deploying a separate instance for each broker — doesn't scale. It means maintaining hundreds of deployments, running migrations across every instance, and dealing with the operational overhead of managing separate infrastructure for each customer.
Multi-tenancy lets us deploy once and serve everyone. Updates ship to all brokers simultaneously. Infrastructure costs are shared. And our engineering team can focus on building features instead of managing deployments.
Per-tenant database isolation
We chose per-tenant database isolation over shared-database approaches. Each broker gets their own PostgreSQL database. This gives us true data isolation — a bug in one query can't accidentally leak data between tenants. It also makes compliance simpler, since each broker's data lives in a clearly separated store.
The tradeoff is complexity in database management. We built automation for tenant provisioning, migrations, backups, and monitoring that works across all tenant databases simultaneously.
Tenant-aware routing
Every request in BrokerVu is tenant-aware. We resolve the tenant from the subdomain or API key at the edge, and all subsequent operations are scoped to that tenant's database and configuration. This happens transparently — application code doesn't need to think about multi-tenancy.
White-label everything
Each tenant can configure their own domain, logo, colors, email templates, and client-facing branding. From the end user's perspective, they're using the broker's own platform. The multi-tenancy is invisible.
Lessons learned
Building multi-tenant infrastructure is harder than single-tenant, but the long-term benefits are worth it. The key is investing in good abstractions early: tenant resolution, database routing, configuration management, and deployment automation. Get these right, and adding new tenants becomes a 5-minute operation instead of a multi-day project.