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As of this writing, the most recent development on the multi-tenancy front was the introduction of multi-Partner support in the Catalog service. This new feature enables Catalog service indexing of data from multiple service endpoints (Sites) tagging each record collected as pertaining to a particular partner. Clients are subsequently able to filter query results by partner short code. Discussion was had around the proper concept to utilize in order to achieve the necessary type of data partitioning required for the use case. Django Sites were considered (with addition of a new SiteConfiguration model), but decided against because the Catalog service is considered a "backend" data service. We attempted to map the Organization concept to this partitioning, but the multi-organization scenario presented by courses.edx.org meant we could not easily use Organization in that context. After reviewing our other services, we noted the concept of Partner was already present in Otto and seeing that it supported the multi-Organization case and did not require Django Sites to be implemented, decided it was the right entity to use for the Catalog service as well.
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