Managing Tenants in a Multi-tenant SaaS
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Date
2010-10-28T03:38:36Z
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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 reuse, 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 prerequisite
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 and validate such systems in a systematic manner. We adopt an intuitive formal model of services. We show that the proposed formalism is easily amenable to tenant requirement analysis and provides a systematic way to support multiple tenant onboarding and diverse service management. We perform a substantial case study of an online conference management system.