Hi Paul, While i don't exactly know the specifics of your service, here we use one slider instance per user/tenant for a given service. For instance we have several hbase clusters running on separate accounts. We use chef and/or our automated deployment tools to automate this kind of per-user instanciations, not slider itself.
For us it made a lot of sense given we're running on a secure kerberized cluster where priviledge separation makes the kind of superuser runs (one service impersonates several tenants) a pain. It made also a lot of sense because the cost of the application master relative to the service is negligible; so there's little to no point in sharing. It makes sense for scheduler accounting too because each user is billed precisely for his resource usage (with your model I guess there's only accounting on the whole service). Last but not least, it fits the paas model better for us: each user can interact at slider level with his own instance securely. If your service can support this kind of setup (even at the cost of reorganizing eg communication through zk) it may be worth your while. Kind regards, JB, from mobile
