= Multi-tenancy
<Multi-tenancy> lets distinct consumers share a <software> service or computing infrastructure while retaining separate data and permitted operations. A tenant is the consumer or administrative grouping treated as one isolated customer. <Resource pooling> commonly assigns shared physical resources dynamically among tenants.<The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing by Peter Mell and Timothy Grance>[§2, Resource pooling and its multi-tenant model]{ref}
For example, two laboratories can use one hosted <database> application. Each laboratory's users must access only their permitted records, even when both laboratories' records occupy the same <database relation>. Checks on each <database query> and limits on resource use serve different purposes: data isolation does not prevent one tenant's expensive work from delaying another. Separate <virtual machines> are one possible implementation boundary, rather than a requirement of <multi-tenancy>.
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