Cloud vs. “Fake Cloud” – The Single Tenant vs. Multi-Tenant Architecture Debate in Drug Discovery
From the desk of Sylvia Ernst, Sr. Director, Community Growth
Part III - Lessons we learned at CDD from running our multitenant system since 2004
- The CDD Vault as a multitenant architecture evolved based on the user community’s feedback and real needs. When one of our customers purchases a new desired feature and we implement it – this new capability becomes available to all users. While this is cool – even better, customers can pool resources to cost-share highly desired features. Many of the truly great software features you use in CDD today were funded and developed collaboratively!
- Software as a Service enables collaboration within emerging externalized and virtualized drug discovery research workflows. Our users get productive within days, even if they are geographically or organizationally remote from the directing or collaborating party. In an industry where every penny counts and each day represents large $ amounts this is a competitive edge.
- Security and everything around hardware and software is kept tightly under control and owned by one party which gives us – and our customers – peace of mind. We know where everything is physically and electronically and we made it, literally, “bomb-proof”. Our security officer and experts work closely with our software team. Even our CEO, Barry Bunin, cannot get into the server room unescorted by the security officer with keys, photo ID, security sign-in, etc. At CDD there are no third party cloud vendors like Amazon (“Amazon cloud”), etc. involved.New software features, updates, implementation etc. – all evolve faster. In addition to the architectural advantage for implementation, our team uses agile methodologies, automated testing, and pair programming to engineer in quality upfront leveraging modern, proven languages like Ruby on Rails (used by large-scale applications like Twitter). Our development team deploys software with the latest secure tools, preconfigured libraries, and best practices. This accelerates development and implementation dramatically.
We update capabilities regularly without disrupting anyone’s installation because of the multitenancy architecture which makes backwards compatibility easy to control. This advantage comes from the SaaS concept where the separation between users is done and enforced on the application level. All personal settings of the application and configurations stay unchanged with the backwards compatible updates.
Conclusion. If you think economically and are looking for a sustainable drug discovery informatics solution then a multitenant solution from a proven, healthy vendor should be your choice. Our track record has been proven since 2004, back to when cloud-based applications were new to our industry. We recommend the CDD Vault and if you find something better out there then we really want to hear from you to learn about it!
To read the whole series, part I-III please click the download button below.
Part I and II introduce to the debate and discuss the architectural impact on: Economics, Security, Updates, maintenance, releases, configuration, customization and collaboration.
This blog is authored by members of the CDD Vault community. CDD Vault is a hosted drug discovery informatics platform that securely manages both private and external biological and chemical data. It provides core functionality including chemical registration, structure activity relationship, chemical inventory, and electronic lab notebook capabilities!
CDD Vault: Drug Discovery Informatics your whole project team will embrace!