Toward Customizable Multi-tenant SaaS Applications

abstract: Nowadays, Computing is so pervasive that it has become indeed the 5th utility (after water, electricity, gas, telephony) as Leonard Kleinrock once envisioned. Evolved from utility computing, cloud computing has emerged as a computing infrastructure that enables rapid delivery of computing resources as a utility in a dynamically scalable, virtualized manner. However, the current industrial cloud computing implementations promote segregation among different cloud providers, which leads to user lockdown because of prohibitive migration cost. On the other hand, Service-Orented Computing (SOC) including service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web Services (WS) promote standardization and openness with its enabling standards and communication protocols. This thesis proposes a Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Architecture by combining the best attributes of the two paradigms to promote an open, interoperable environment for cloud computing development. Mutil-tenancy SaaS applicantions built on top of SOCCA have more flexibility and are not locked down by a certain platform. Tenants residing on a multi-tenant application appear to be the sole owner of the application and not aware of the existence of others. A multi-tenant SaaS application accommodates each tenant’s unique requirements by allowing tenant-level customization. A complex SaaS application that supports hundreds, even thousands of tenants could have hundreds of customization points with each of them providing multiple options, and this could result in a huge number of ways to customize the application. This dissertation also proposes innovative customization approaches, which studies similar tenants’ customization choices and each individual users behaviors, then provides guided semi-automated customization process for the future tenants. A semi-automated customization process could enable tenants to quickly implement the customization that best suits their business needs.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Systemunterstützung für den Abgleich von Geschäftsobjekten zwischen Anwendungsservern über WebServices: Systemunterstützung für den Abgleich von Geschäftsobjekten zwischen Anwendungsservern über WebServices

Geschäftsanwendungen wie Supply Chain Management (SCM) oder Customer Relationship Management (CRM) werden repliziert, um eine hohe Skalierbarkeit und schnellen lokalen Zugriff zu erreichen. Die Geschäftsobjekte als Datencontainer der Anwendungen müssen infolge von Änderungen synchronisiert werden. Diese Arbeit leistet einen Beitrag zur Effizienzsteigerung des Synchronisationsprozesses durch die Reduzierung der Anzahl der Synchronisationsnachrichten sowie der zu übertragenden Datenmenge - auch unter Berücksichtigung des entstehenden Mehraufwands durch zusätzliche Verarbeitungsprozesse.Business applications such as supply chain management (SCM) or customer relationship management (CRM) are replicated in order to reach high scalability and fast local access. The business objects representing the data containers have to be synchronized to stay consistent across the application servers. This thesis provides a contribution to reach more efficiency during the synchronization process by reducing the amount of synchronization messages and the amount of data to be transmitted. The additional effort due to further processing steps is taken into account via a proper cost model