Multi-tenancy: share the model, isolate the users

Picture it

Imagine a grand hotel where hundreds of guests share the same foundation, plumbing, and staff, but each holds a key to their own isolated suite. In multi-tenant serving, the massive base model acts as the shared building, while tiny, personalized adapter weights are swapped in and out like custom decor for each room. This architecture dramatically lowers the cost of hosting thousands of unique models, provided we carefully police the hallways so no single loud neighbor ruins the experience for everyone else.

What to understand

• Adapter loading/eviction, multi-LoRA batching, and cache identity
• Per-tenant quotas, accounting, noisy neighbors, MIG and time sharing

Follow the references

1. 1 · Documentation

   vLLM · LoRA adapters ↗

   Read adapter limits, loading, and security considerations.

2. 2 · Documentation

   NVIDIA · Multi-Instance GPU user guide ↗

   Compare hardware partitioning with software sharing and its capacity tradeoffs.

Make it concrete

Run mixed tenants with one long-context burst and changing adapters. Measure per-tenant p95 latency, memory, fairness, and whether quotas protect the others.