How the economics of multitenancy work

Blacksmith explains how its serverless CI platform uses multitenancy to make bursty, short-lived CI workloads economically viable by pooling capacity across customers rather than requiring each customer to provision for peak demand. Individual customers may need thousands of vCPUs during code pushes but have long idle periods, while aggregated demand from many customers smooths into a more predictable pattern, improving fleet utilization and lowering the cost per job. The company operates a fixed-cost fleet of bare-metal machines that launch temporary Firecracker microVMs, making average utilization the primary driver of gross margins; it reports that margins rise sharply as utilization increases. Usage patterns also vary by weekday, time zone, and region, with European and Asian customers helping fill lower-demand periods in a fleet largely used by US customers. Blacksmith has expanded from a European region to a US region to meet latency and compliance needs, and argues that adding customers improves efficiency, supports lower prices, and strengthens profitability through the economics of multitenant infrastructure.

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