Variability in Multi-tenant Environments: Architectural Design Patterns from Industry

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Authors: Jaap Kabbedijk, Slinger Jansen

Tags: 2011, conceptual modeling

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 multi-tenant 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.

Read the full paper here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-24574-9_20