SaaS Multi-Tenancy: Framework, Technology, and Case Study

SaaS (Software as a Service) provides new business opportunities for application providers to serve more customers in a scalable and cost-effective way. SaaS also raises new challenges and one of them is multi-tenancy. Multi-tenancy is the requirement of deploying only one shared application to serve multiple customers (i.e. tenant) instead of deploying one dedicated application for each customer. This paper describes the authors’ practice of developing and deploying multi-tenant technologies. This paper targets a technology that could quickly enable existing Java EE (Enterprise Edition) applications to be multi-tenancy enabled thus having the benefit of quick time to market. This paper describes the overall framework of multi-tenant SaaS platform, how to migrate an existing Java EE application, how to provision the multi-tenant application, and how to onboard the tenants. The paper also shows experiments which compare the economics of multi-tenant SaaS deployment versus traditional application deployment (one application for one tenant) with precise data.