Indeed, but if you are making a B2B enterprise/SMB SaaS, I think you are most likely to regret the opposite choice [1][2]. A lot of companies run a single instance, multitenant application and have to develop custom sharding functionality down the road when they realize the inevitable: that most joins and caches are only needed on strict subsets of the data that are tenant specific.
If you get successful enough in this type of application space, you reach a mature state in which you need to be able to:
* Run large dedicated instances for your largest customers, because either their performance or security requirements mandate it.
* Share resources among a large number of smaller customers, for efficiency and fault tolerance reasons.
You can get there in two ways:
* You start with a massive multi tenant application, and you figure out a way to shard it and separate in pieces later.
* You start with multiple small applications, and you develop the ability to orchestrate the group, and scale the largest of them.
I would argue the latter is more flexible and cost efficient, and requires less technical prowess.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23307172
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23307139
If you get successful enough in this type of application space, you reach a mature state in which you need to be able to:
* Run large dedicated instances for your largest customers, because either their performance or security requirements mandate it.
* Share resources among a large number of smaller customers, for efficiency and fault tolerance reasons.
You can get there in two ways:
* You start with a massive multi tenant application, and you figure out a way to shard it and separate in pieces later.
* You start with multiple small applications, and you develop the ability to orchestrate the group, and scale the largest of them.
I would argue the latter is more flexible and cost efficient, and requires less technical prowess.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23307172
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23307139