Building Multi-Tenant SaaS Architectures

Chapter 8. Data Partitioning

As we wander deeper into the multi-tenant services of a SaaS environment, we must also begin to look at how these services represent, access, and manage data in a multi-tenant model. While the fundamentals of multi-tenant data are relatively easy to wrap your mind around, there are lots of nuances that come with selecting a multi-tenant storage strategy that aligns with the requirements of your environment.

There are multiple factors that can have a direct influence on how you store data for a given workload in your SaaS environment. Compliance, noisy neighbor, isolation, performance, cost—any of these might have a significant influence on how you choose to represent your data in a multi-tenant setting. Technology also plays a big part in this story. Each storage technology has its own set of constraints, constructs, and mechanisms that will need to be considered as part of your data partitioning strategy.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the full range of data partitioning considerations, highlighting the different factors that are typically going to shape your data partitioning model. We’ll start by looking at some of the fundamentals of data partitioning, reviewing the common themes and considerations that apply regardless of the storage technology you may be using. We’ll also look at the natural connections between data partitioning and tenant isolation to help you understand how isolation might play a larger role in determining the data partitioning ...