Building Multi-Tenant SaaS Architectures

Chapter 5. Tenant Management

In the previous chapter, we started our foray into the control plane, looking at the broader role that onboarding and identity play in bringing your multi-tenant architecture to life. As part of that process, I touched on how the Tenant Management service is used to introduce new tenants into the system. Now, it’s time to dig more into this service, getting a better sense of its inner workings and examining the full scope of its responsibility. This will give you a better sense of the data, operations, and constructs that put tenant management at the center of configuring aspects of your tenant architecture and managing the lifecycle of key tenant events.

We’ll start by looking at the fundamentals of what it means to build your Tenant Management service, exploring the elements of its core design and implementation. As part of this, I’ll get into some of the common tenant attributes that are managed by this service. You’ll see that storing and managing these attributes is mostly straightforward. However, what you choose to store here can have other downstream implications, expanding its role and usage across the overall footprint of your SaaS architecture.

To better understand the broader role and experience of tenant management, we also have to look at how you will enable management of your tenants. We’ll look at how this can surface through APIs or a system administration console. It’s here that you’ll get another view into how your Tenant Management ...