Multi-tenancy Design Patterns in SaaS Applications: A Performance Evaluation Case Study

Abstract

Utility-like computing has emerged as the future of computing for many organizations seeking to remain competitive in today's business environment. Promising features such as rapid elasticity, low cost provisioning, pay-as-use model, layered security, measured service, resource pooling, are the reasons companies are opting for this technology. Cloud technologies are provided as services ranging from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Data as a Service (DaaS). SaaS has become one of de facto approach for deploying cloud base services or applications for many businesses. At the core of SaaS is Multi-tenancy; multi-tenancy gives customers (i.e. tenants) and providers vast opportunities to leverage the power of cloud infrastructure by consolidating operational entities. The drive toward multi-tenancy in SaaS application is a result of the economic benefit derived by shared development and maintenance cost. This paper presents different multi-tenancy models at the data layer as dedicated, isolated and shared. The paper further empirically evaluates the performance of these models in a containerized environment. Our results show that under a containerized environment dedicated and isolated schema performed reasonably well in terms of latency when compared to shared model. Although the shared model proved to more resource efficient, it performance is greatly affected by finite resources shared by many concurrent tenants.

The multi-tenancy queueing system “QuAntri” for public service mall

“…Unlike multi-users and multi-instances, multi-tenants are able to share one application for several tenants with different locations. Abdul et al [21] they can provide great opportunities to harness the power of cloud infrastructure enabling the tenants to increase the consolidation of data layer operational entities to be dedicated, isolated, and shared. The use of infrastructure can also be done in other ways by applying a multitenant management pattern [22], [23] such as the model-view-controller (MVC), model-view-presenter (MVP), and model-view-view-model (MVVM).…”