Variability in multi-tenant environments: architectural design patterns from industry

  • Authors:

  • Jaap Kabbedijk;Slinger Jansen

  • Affiliations:

  • Utrecht University, Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht, Netherlands;Utrecht University, Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht, Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • ER'11 Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Advances in conceptual modeling: recent developments and new directions
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

In order to serve a lot of different customers in a SaaS environment, software vendors have to comply to a range of different varying requirements in their software product. Because of these varying requirements and the large number of customers, a variable multitenant solution is needed to achieve this goal. This paper gives a pragmatic approach to the concepts of multi-tenancy and variability in SaaS environments and proposes three architectural patterns that support variability in multi-tenant SaaS environments. The Customizable Data Views pattern, the Module Dependent Menu pattern and the Pre/Post Update Hooks pattern are explained and shown as good practices for applying variability in a multi-tenant SaaS environment. All patterns are based on case studies performed at two large software vendors in the Netherlands who are offering an ERP software product as a service.