Multi-tenancy - Temporal feature

Multi-tenancy in Temporal operates at two levels:

Namespace isolation

Namespaces are Temporal's unit of isolation, providing logical separation for multi-tenant deployments in both open source Temporal and Temporal Cloud.

Open source Temporal

Namespaces in self-hosted Temporal provide:

• Workflow ID uniqueness: Temporal guarantees unique Workflow IDs within a Namespace. Different Namespaces can have Workflows with the same ID without conflict.
• Resource isolation: Traffic from one Namespace does not impact other Namespaces on the same Temporal Service.
• Configuration boundaries: Settings like Retention Period and Archival destination are configured per Namespace.
• Access control: Use a custom Authorizer on your Frontend Service to restrict who can access each Namespace.

Temporal Cloud

Temporal Cloud builds on these capabilities with additional isolation guarantees:

• Independent authentication via API keys or mTLS certificates
• Built-in role-based access controls without custom Authorizer configuration
• Separate rate limits to prevent noisy neighbor problems
• High availability replication across regions
• Controlled inter-namespace communication only through Nexus

Related 📚

• Namespace Isolation Details
• Temporal Cloud Pricing

Application multi-tenancy

Many organizations use Temporal to power their own multi-tenant SaaS applications, isolating their customers' workloads using Task Queues, Search Attributes, and Worker design patterns.

See the multi-tenant application patterns guide for detailed recommendations on architecting multi-tenant applications with Temporal.