Tenant Onboarding in Evolving Multi-tenant SaaS
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Date
2011-10-06T02:00:53Z
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Abstract
A multi-tenant software as a service (SaaS) system has to meet the needs of several tenant organizations, which connect to the system to utilize its services. To leverage economies of scale through re-use, a SaaS vendor would, in
general, like to drive commonality amongst the requirements across tenants. However, many tenants will also come with some custom requirements that may be a pre-requisite for them to adopt the SaaS system. These requirements then need to be addressed by evolving the SaaS system in a controlled manner,
while still supporting the requirements of existing tenants. In this paper, we study the challenges associated with engineering multi-tenant SaaS systems and develop a framework to help evolve such systems in a systematic manner. We adopt an intuitive formal model of services that is easily amenable to tenant requirement analysis and provides a robust way to support multiple tenant onboarding. We perform a substantial case study of a multi-tenant blog server to demonstrate the benefits of our proposed approach.