Zero Effort Single Instance Multi-Tenancy
Single instance multi-tenancy is a software architecture principal where your application components such as your database, web services, and user interfaces are shared across many customers rather than each customer having their own copy. Single instance, multi-tenancy is one of the most important architectural qualities of modern day SaaS applications; it ensures a high level resource utilization without sacrificing quality, giving your business the ability to deliver SaaS with extreme cost effectiveness. However, single instance multi-tenancy is also one of the most difficult, time consuming, and expensive parts of a SaaS architecture to engineer and maintain.
SaaSGrid’s zero effort single instance multi-tenancy isolates your customers by handling data partitioning, request routing, and authorization security at the application server layer – even though your customers might be sharing resources. Moreover, SaaSGrid gives you the ability to define certain aspects of your application’s multi-tenant behavior, such as whether data from multiple customers can be mixed in database deployments or separated into dedicated databases. This powerful concept of configurable “drop-in” single instance, multi-tenant capability provides a massive time-to-market boost and takes a major maintenance and security painpoint off your plate.
Key Points
• Zero-effort single instance multi-tenancy enables a single instance of your application to serve thousands of your customers.
• Mulit-tenant data model strategies and other significant design time considerations become flexible deploy time configuration options with SaaSGrid.
• Choose from a single commingled database, a database schema per customer, or an isolated database per customer.
Impact on Cost of Service: HIGH
Why?
Would you construct and maintain an entire apartment building for each family that was paying you for a place to live? Just like tenants in a single apartment building provide the economies of scale for more cost effective maintenance and living arrangements, software economies have evolved in a similar fashion. Setting up an entire instance of your application for each customer means underutilized infrastructure resources, and adds a layer of maintenance and management complexity that translates into hard and soft dollar costs.
Software Engineers Should Know
When writing your application to deploy on SaaSGrid, you don’t need to worry about multi-tenancy. Your application is written very much like a regular on-premises application in that it targets single customer deployment with no notion of multi-tenancy in the source code, database, or user interfaces. However, once that application is deployed to an instance of SaaSGrid and is running live, SaaSGrid automatically endows your application with a single instance, multi-tenant architecture with zero effort on your part. You can easily develop and test your code locally using the SaaSGrid SDK, and when ready can experience your application in a multi-tenant fashion by publishing it to a SaaSGrid instance. Once deployed, SaaSGrid will automatically provide login capabilities, tenant provisioning, and all other multi-tenant must haves, allowing you to focus on your business and its success – NOT the difficulties of SaaS delivery.
Related Media
Learn more, and explore SaaSGrid's features to find out how each one impacts your cost of delivering your software as a service. All of these ingredients combined allow you to focus on what you do best, and deliver your software with a cost profile needed for sustainable growth and market leadership.
