Multi-tenancy and Sub-tenancy Architecture in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

Abstract

Multi-tenancy architecture (MTA) is often used in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and the central idea is that multiple tenant applications can be developed using components stored in the SaaS infrastructure. Recently, MTA has been extended where a tenant application can have its own sub-tenants as the tenant application acts like a SaaS infrastructure. In other words, MTA is extended to STA (Sub-Tenancy Architecture ). In STA, each tenant application not only need to develop its own functionalities, but also need to prepare an infrastructure to allow its sub-tenants to develop customized applications. This dissertation formulates eight models for STA, and proposes a Variant Point based customization model to help tenants and subtenants customize tenant and sub-tenant applications. In addition, this dissertation introduces Crowd-sourcing to become the core of STA component development life cycle. To discover fit tenant developers or components to help building and composing new components, dynamic and static ranking models are proposed. Further, rank computation architecture is presented to deal with the case when the number of tenants and components becomes huge. At last, an experiment is performed to prove rank models and the rank computation architecture work as design. Finally, I dedicate this dissertation to my many friends, Song Xiang, Feng Guo,

Autonomous Decentralized Authorization and Authentication Management for Hierarchical Multi-Tenancy

“…Currently there are lots of ways to implement MTA [1]. But [7] points out that "multi-tenancy" lacks of a clear definition.…”

“…The Multi-Tenancy Architecture (MTA) is often used in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) where multiple tenants can use the same code base stored in the SaaS to develop applications, with assurance of each tenant's privacy [1]. A tenant can be a single user or an organizational entity.…”

“…Each subsidiary is built either as an independent tenant which makes customized resource sharing and re-customization among relative tenants difficult to implement, or as a user group of a tenant where the real world hierarchical relations are implied by complicated role hierarchy and sharing constraints. Recently more and more researches [1]- [4] are taking an interest in hierarchical multitenancy, which enables tenants to be divided into subtenants. It is a flexible and scalable architecture for representing sub- a) E-mail: qiong zuo@hust.edu.cn b) E-mail: wtsai@asu.edu (Corresponding author) DOI: 10.1587/transcom.2015ADI0002 Table 1 Access control requirements of hierarchical multi-tenancy and how much MTA can satisfy.…”

“…sets of users and application resources in the real world. Tsai [1] presents Sub-Tenancy Architecture (STA) to model tenant and subtenants relationships. In STA, multiple hierarchical autonomous tenants co-exist.…”

BRAHMA: An intelligent framework for automated scaling of streaming and deadline-critical workflows

“…With the ever increasing use of multi-component, multitenant models [13], [32] for building SaaS applications and the exponential rise in popularity of cloud based services, automatically and correctly scaling these services at runtime is of paramount importance. Key challenges are: (1) Scaling the resulting application up or down depending on monitored user/tenant load in order to keep the SLA, no longer becomes an issue of scaling resources for a single service, but instead results in a complex problem of scaling all individual service endpoints in the workflow and (2) In a real-world setting, application workflows can possess a host of characteristics: ranging from execution flows being either streaming or sequential (details in Sec.…”