Building Multi-Tenant SaaS Architectures

Chapter 4. Onboarding and Identity

Now that you have a sense of the broader multi-tenant terminology and landscape, let’s look at what it means to bring these concepts to life in a working solution. The question is: where do you start? So many teams ask me this question. Fortunately, this is an area where I think there’s a pretty uniform answer. Whether you’re migrating or greenfield, I’d always point you at onboarding, identity, and the control plane as the starting point for building most multi-tenant architectures. Each of these elements forces important, foundational constructs into your environment, defining how tenants will be introduced and how users will be created and bound to tenants. These first steps will begin to establish the building blocks of our control plane.

By starting here, you’ll put tenancy front and center. This means that all the layers of your architecture are now forced to be multi-tenant aware. Each component of your system will now have to consider how tenancy might shape its design and implementation. While this may seem like a subtle nuance, its impact is quite profound. The mere presence of tenancy touches how you isolate tenants, how you represent their data, how you support multiple personas, how you bill tenants, and a host of other aspects of your solution. It also begins to establish the clear boundary between the control and application planes. The goal is to avoid falling into the trap of starting with the application and bolting on tenancy ...