Entity Framework could be a logical choice when building a .NET Core API that needs to talk to a database. In this blog, I’ll show you how to get started with EF and Migrations. We will create the models, the DbContext, and the migrations needed to upgrade your database when introducing changes. We will also see how we can deploy those changes in your Azure DevOps pipeline on each release.

In the first post in this series, we’re going to talk about the infrastructure. We need some database server to host each tenant’s database and the shared database that contains information on all the tenants (like which database belongs to whom). We also need infrastructure to host the API on and off course, need something for configuration and secret management. TL;DR: All templates and the pipeline can be found in my repository.

I recently started building an architecture for a multi-tenant app to support a database per tenant (customer) scenario for one of my customers. Splitting your data in multiple databases like that has a few benefits like easy backup and restore per customer, better security by separation of data, and potential performance benefits. Especially the separation of data was a hard requirement here. I found this to be a nice challenge as it involves many moving parts to get it right.