Building Multi-Tenant SaaS Architectures

Chapter 7. Building Multi-Tenant Services

Much of our focus up to this point has been centered around building out all the foundational elements of our multi-tenant architecture. This meant digging into the control plane and figuring out how to put a core set of services in place that would allow us to introduce the notion of tenants into a SaaS environment. We looked at how tenants are onboarded, how their identity is established, how they are authenticated, and—most importantly—how all of this ends up injecting tenant context into the services of our application. This should have given you a healthy respect for the role that the control plane plays in a SaaS environment and illustrated just how critical it is to invest in creating a seamless strategy for introducing foundational tenant constructs into your multi-tenant architecture.

Now, we can start to shift our attention to the application plane. It is here where we can start to think about how we will apply multi-tenancy to the design and implementation of the services that will bring our application to life. In this chapter, we will begin to look at how the nuances of multi-tenant workloads will influence the way we approach the design and decomposition of services. Isolation, noisy neighbor, data partitioning—these all represent new parameters that you’ll need to factor into the design of your services. You’ll see that multi-tenancy adds new wrinkles to the classic services design discussion, forcing you to take new approaches ...