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Manage tenants

Tenant activity statuses​

As MyPrivateJournal grows the team notices that the resource requirements and associated costs are growing.

Meanwhile, the team also notices these usage patterns:

  • Many users use the application for small parts of the day, and then log off.
  • Some users are infrequent, accessing the service only occasionally.
  • Some users drop off after a while, and their data is not accessed for a long time.

Weaviate's multi-tenancy features can help MyPrivateJournal manage these usage patterns more effectively. Let's see how:

Introduction to tenant activity statuses​

But first, let's talk a little about tenant activity statuses. Up to now, you've worked with tenants without specifying an activity status. This creates an ACTIVE tenant by default.

But a tenant can be set to have an ACTIVE, INACTIVE, or OFFLOADED status.

Tenant stateCRUD & QueriesVector IndexInverted IndexObject DataTime to ActivateTenant description
Active (default)YesHot/WarmWarmWarmNoneAvailable for use
InactiveNoWarmWarmWarmFastNot available for use, stored locally
OffloadedNoColdColdColdSlowNot available for use, stored on the cloud

These states are mutable, letting you manage your tenants more effectively, balancing cost, availability and performance.

Manage tenant activity statuses​

So, you might start to see how MyPrivateJournal can leverage tenant activity statues to improve their operational efficiency.

Deactivate a tenant​

Since INACTIVE tenants use less resources than ACTIVE tenants, MyPrivateJournal can deactivate tenants that are unlikely to be immediately accessed.

One example is a user who's just logged out of the application. We could set their tenant to INACTIVE as a part of the logout process:

from weaviate.classes.tenants import Tenant, TenantActivityStatus

mt_collection = client.collections.get(mt_collection_name)

mt_collection.tenants.update(
    Tenant(name="travis1989", activity_status=TenantActivityStatus.INACTIVE)
)
py docs  API docs

Deactivate multiple tenants​

MyPrivateJournal can also deactivate multiple tenants at once. For example, they could deactivate all tenants for their local night time, or those who have not logged on for over 7 days:

from weaviate.classes.tenants import Tenant, TenantActivityStatus

mt_collection = client.collections.get(mt_collection_name)

tenants_to_deactivate = [
    Tenant(name=user, activity_status=TenantActivityStatus.INACTIVE)
    for user in inactive_users
]

mt_collection.tenants.update(tenants_to_deactivate)
py docs  API docs

Offload tenants​

MyPrivateJournal can also offload tenants to the cloud. This is useful for tenants that are unlikely to be accessed in the near future.

For example, they could offload tenants that have not been accessed for over 30 days:

from weaviate.classes.tenants import Tenant, TenantActivityStatus

mt_collection = client.collections.get(mt_collection_name)

tenants_to_offload = [
    Tenant(name=user, activity_status=TenantActivityStatus.OFFLOADED)
    for user in tenant_names_to_offload
]

mt_collection.tenants.update(tenants_to_offload)
py docs  API docs

This will move the tenant's data to cold storage, freeing up hot and warm resources. In turn, the overall system requirements and cost will be lowered.

How to set up offloading
Offloading: AWS S3 only

As of Weaviate v1.26.0, tenants can only be offloaded to cold storage in AWS S3. Additional storage options may be added in future releases.

To offload a tenant, use the offload-s3 module.

The ability to offload tenants to cold storage is a powerful feature that can help you manage your Weaviate instance's resource usage.


To use tenant offloading in Weaviate, you need enable a relevant offloading module. Depending on whether your deployment is on Docker or Kubernetes, you can enable the offload-s3 module as shown below.

services:
  weaviate:
    environment:
      ENABLE_MODULES: 'offload-s3' # plus other modules you may need
      OFFLOAD_S3_BUCKET: 'weaviate-offload' # the name of the S3 bucket
      OFFLOAD_S3_BUCKET_AUTO_CREATE: 'true' # create the bucket if it does not exist

If the target S3 bucket does not exist, the OFFLOAD_S3_BUCKET_AUTO_CREATE variable must be set to true so that Weaviate can create the bucket automatically.


AWS permissions​

You must provide Weaviate with AWS authentication details. You can choose between access-key or ARN-based authentication.


Requirements

The Weaviate instance must have the necessary permissions to access the S3 bucket.

  • The provided AWS identity must be able to write to the bucket.
  • If OFFLOAD_S3_BUCKET_AUTO_CREATE is set to true, the AWS identity must have permission to create the bucket.

Option 1: With IAM and ARN roles


The backup module will first try to authenticate itself using AWS IAM. If the authentication fails then it will try to authenticate with Option 2.


Option 2: With access key and secret access key


Environment variableDescription
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_IDThe id of the AWS access key for the desired account.
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEYThe secret AWS access key for the desired account.
AWS_REGION(Optional) The AWS Region. If not provided, the module will try to parse AWS_DEFAULT_REGION.

Once the offload-s3 module is enabled, you can offload tenants to the S3 bucket by setting their activity status to OFFLOADED, or load them back to local storage by setting their status to ACTIVE or INACTIVE.

Activate users​

And then, MyPrivateJournal can activate tenants as required. For example, they could activate a tenant when the user logs in, or based on their local time in an inverse pattern to deactivation:

from weaviate.classes.tenants import Tenant, TenantActivityStatus

mt_collection = client.collections.get(mt_collection_name)

tenants_to_activate = [
    Tenant(name=user, activity_status=TenantActivityStatus.ACTIVE)
    for user in tenant_names_to_activate
]

mt_collection.tenants.update(tenants_to_activate)
py docs  API docs

Leverage auto-activation​

There may also be cases where a user attempts to perform a query on an INACTIVE tenant.

This may sound like a problem, but Weaviate can automatically activate the tenant for the query, if the collection was created with auto_tenant_activation enabled (which we did do earlier).

Offboard users​

As with all SaaS applications, MyPrivateJournal will need to offboard users from time to time. This could be due to a user request, or any other reason for account deletion.

In a multi-tenant collection, offboarding a user can easily be done by removing their tenant. This will delete the tenant and all its data.

from weaviate.classes.tenants import Tenant

mt_collection = client.collections.get(mt_collection_name)

# Caution - this will remove all of the associated data for the tenants
mt_collection.tenants.remove([
    "depardieu10",
    "travis1989",
])
py docs  API docs

The MyPrivateJournal engineers could set up its offboarding system to remove a user's tenant when they delete their account or request data deletion. This will ensure that the user's data is removed from the system.

Summary​

In this section, you learned how to manage tenants in a multi-tenant collection. You saw how to:

  • Update a tenant's activity status
  • Offload tenants to cold storage
  • Activate tenants as required
  • Remove tenants from the system

These features can help MyPrivateJournal manage its resource usage more effectively, and provide a better experience for its users.

Questions and feedback​

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know in the user forum.