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Using Microservices to Customize Multi-Tenant SaaS: From Intrusive to Non-Intrusive

Authors Hui Song, Phu H. Nguyen , Franck Chauvel

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Software as a service orchestration systems
  • Software and its engineering → Cloud computing
  • Applied computing → Service-oriented architectures
Keywords
  • Customization
  • Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
  • Microservices
  • Multi-tenancy
  • Cloud
  • Reference Architecture

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Abstract

Customization is a widely adopted practice on enterprise software applications such as Enterprise resource planning (ERP) or Customer relation management (CRM). Software vendors deploy their enterprise software product on the premises of a customer, which is then often customized for different specific needs of the customer. When enterprise applications are moving to the cloud as mutli-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the traditional way of on-premises customization faces new challenges because a customer no longer has an exclusive control to the application. To empower businesses with specific requirements on top of the shared standard SaaS, vendors need a novel approach to support the customization on the multi-tenant SaaS. In this paper, we summarize our two approaches for customizing multi-tenant SaaS using microservices: intrusive and non-intrusive. The paper clarifies the key concepts related to the problem of multi-tenant customization, and describes a design with a reference architecture and high-level principles. We also discuss the key technical challenges and the feasible solutions to implement this architecture. Our microservice-based customization solution is promising to meet the general customization requirements, and achieves a balance between isolation, assimilation and economy of scale.

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Hui Song, Phu H. Nguyen, and Franck Chauvel. Using Microservices to Customize Multi-Tenant SaaS: From Intrusive to Non-Intrusive. In Joint Post-proceedings of the First and Second International Conference on Microservices (Microservices 2017/2019). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 78, pp. 1:1-1:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.Microservices.2017-2019.1

Author Details

Hui Song
  • SINTEF, Oslo, Norway
Phu H. Nguyen
  • SINTEF, Oslo, Norway
Franck Chauvel
  • SINTEF, Oslo, Norway

Funding

This work is funded by the Research Council of Norway under the grant agreement number 256594 (the Cirrus project).

Acknowledgements

We want to thank our colleagues at Supper Office and Visma for the fruitful collaboration in the Cirrus project.

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