I've been reading about instances and tenants and in the Saas architecture. My questions are as follows (please correct anything that you notice I've gotten wrong with any of the following terms):
1) Instance: Is an instance of a piece of software just a copy of that software with its own database? Is there anything more to it than that?
2) Tenant: Is a tenant a user / group of users that share a common set of access privileges to an individual instance?
3) Single-instance: If a Saas provider offers single-instance service, does this mean that they create only a single instance of their software? Or does it mean that there could be multiple instances, but that each instance can serve multiple tenants? If so, is single-instance the same as multi-tenant?
4) Multi-instance: Does this mean that each instance can serve only one tenant, or can there be multiple instances that each serve multiple tenants? ie. Can a multi-instance service be either single-tenant or multi-tenant?
5) Single-tenant: Does this just mean that an individual instance can serve only one tenant, or does it also imply that there are multiple instances? ie. Can a single-tenant service be both single-instance and multi-instance?
6) Multi-tenant: Does this just mean that an individual instance can serve multiple tenants, or does it imply that there is only a single instance? ie. Can a multi-tenant service be both single-instance and multi-instance?
7) To sum up: Can you have single-instance+single-tenant, single-instance+multi-tenant, multi-instance+single-tenant, and multi-instance+multi-tenant?