Using Microservices to Customize Multi-Tenant SaaS: From Intrusive to Non-Intrusive

Customization is a widely adopted practice on enterprise software applications such as Enterprise resource planning (ERP) or Customer relation management (CRM). Software vendors deploy their enterprise software product on the premises of a customer, which is then often customized for different specific needs of the customer. When enterprise applications are moving to the cloud as mutli-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the traditional way of on-premises customization faces new challenges because a customer no longer has an exclusive control to the application. To empower businesses with specific requirements on top of the shared standard SaaS, vendors need a novel approach to support the customization on the multi-tenant SaaS. In this paper, we summarize our two approaches for customizing multi-tenant SaaS using microservices: intrusive and non-intrusive. The paper clarifies the key concepts related to the problem of multi-tenant customization, and describes a design with a reference architecture and high-level principles. We also discuss the key technical challenges and the feasible solutions to implement this architecture. Our microservice-based customization solution is promising to meet the general customization requirements, and achieves a balance between isolation, assimilation and economy of scale

Evolving multi-tenant SaaS cloud applications using model-driven engineering

Cloud computing promotes multi-tenancy for efficient resource utilization by sharing hardware and software infrastructure among multiple clients. Multi-tenant applications running on a cloud infrastructure are provided to clients as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) over the network. Despite its benefits, multi-tenancy introduces additional challenges, such as p artitioning, extensibility, and customizability during the application development. Over time, after the application deployment, new requirements of clients and changes in business environment result application evolution. As the application evolves, its complexity also increases. In multi-tenancy, evolution demanded by individual clients should not affect availability , security , and performance of the application for other clients. Thus, the multi- tenancy concerns add more complexity by causing variability in design decisions. Managing this complexity requires adequate approaches and tools. In this paper, we propose modeling techniques from software product lines (SPL) and model-driven engineering (MDE) to manage variability and support evolution of multi-tenant applications and their requirements. Specifically, SPL was ap p lied to define technological and concep tual variabilities during the application design, where MDE was suggested to manage these variabilities. We also present a process of how MDE can address evolution of multi-tenant applications using variability models

Event-based Customization of Multi-tenant SaaS Using Microservices

Popular enterprise software such as ERP, CRM is now being made available on the Cloud in the multi-tenant Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The added values come from the ability of vendors to enable customer-specific business advantage for every different tenant who uses the same main enterprise software product. Software vendors need novel customization solutions for Cloud-based multi-tenant SaaS. In this paper, we present an event-based approach in a non-intrusive customization framework that can enable customization for multi-tenant SaaS and address the problem of too many API calls to the main software product. The experimental results on Microsoft’s eShopOnContainers show that our approach can empower an event bus with the ability to customize the flow of processing events, and integrate with tenant-specific microservices for customization. We have shown how our approach makes sure of tenant-isolation, which is crucial in practice for SaaS vendors. This direction can also reduce the number of API calls to the main software product, even when every tenant has different customization services.publishedVersio

A Review Of Multi-Tenant Database And Factors That Influence Its Adoption.

A Multi-tenant database (MTD) is a way of deploying a Database as a Service (DaaS). This is gaining momentum with significant increase in the number of organizations ready to take advantage of the technology. A multi-tenant database refers to a principle where a single instance of a Database Management System (DBMS) runs on a server, serving multiple clients organizations (tenants). This is a database which provides database support to a number of separate and distinct groups of users or tenants. This concept spreads the cost of hardware, software and other services to a large number of tenants, therefore significantly reducing per tenant cost. Three different approaches of implementing multi-tenant database have been identified. These methods have been shown to be increasingly better at pooling resources and also processing administrative operations in bulk. This paper reports the requirement of multi-tenant databases, challenges of implementing MTD, database migration for elasticity in MTD and factors influencing the choice of models in MTD. An insightful discussion is presented in this paper by grouping these factors into four categories. This shows that the degree of tenancy is an influence to the approach to be adopted and the capital and operational expenditure are greatly reduced in comparison with an on-premises solutio

Migrating Monoliths to Microservices-based Customizable Multi-tenant Cloud-native Apps

It was common that software vendors sell licenses to their clients to use software products, such as Enterprise Resource Planning, which are deployed as a monolithic entity on clients’ premises. Moreover, many clients, especially big organizations, often require software products to be customized for their specific needs before deployment on premises. While software vendors are trying to migrate their monolithic software products to Cloud-native Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), they face two big challenges that this paper aims at addressing: 1) How to migrate their exclusive monoliths to multi-tenant Cloud-native SaaS; and 2) How to enable tenant-specific customization for multi-tenant Cloud-native SaaS. This paper suggests an approach for migrating monoliths to microservice-based Cloud-native SaaS, providing customers with a flexible customization opportunity, while taking advantage of the economies of scale that the Cloud and multi-tenancy provide. Our approach shows not only the migration to microservices but also how to introduce the necessary infrastructure to support the new services and enable tenant-specific customization. We illustrate the application of our approach on migrating a reference application of Microsoft called SportStore.acceptedVersio