Building Multi-Tenant SaaS Architectures

Chapter 2. Multi-Tenant Architecture Fundamentals

As you progress through this book, you’ll realize that SaaS architecture comes in many shapes and sizes. There are countless permutations of multi-tenant architecture patterns and strategies that are composed to create the SaaS architecture that best aligns with the domain, compliance, and business realities of a SaaS company.

There are, however, some core themes that span all SaaS architectures. The goal of this chapter is to explore a set of architecture constructs and concepts as the most fundamental starting point for building a multi-tenant SaaS architecture. The idea is to outline the details of the core building blocks to set the table for a much deeper review of how these concepts are brought to life with specific technologies. I’ve intentionally tried to keep this coverage very focused on just those architectural constructs that need to be top of mind as each builder begins to define the moving parts of their SaaS environment.

We’ll start this review by looking at the notion of tenancy and how tenant context is introduced into your architecture. The goal is to highlight the role tenancy plays across your entire architecture, outlining how and where it touches the different layers of a multi-tenant architecture. From there, we can then shift into looking at how we group and organize the different elements of your multi-tenant architecture. The focus will be on identifying the common moving parts of any SaaS architecture, ...