Building Multi-Tenant SaaS Architectures

Chapter 14. Tiering Strategies

For architects and builders, the mention of concepts like tiering and billing may elicit a less than enthusiastic response. The technical brain often assumes that anything related to how a product is priced or sold is outside of their realm. It’s a natural reaction. Technical teams are often used to having a hard line between how a system is designed and how that offering is presented to customers.

In a SaaS environment—where we’re constantly blurring the lines between business and technical domains—technical teams usually have a vested interest in understanding how the personas, packaging, tiering, and pricing of a service will shape the scale, performance, and experience delivered by the underlying architecture. In reality, part of the multi-tenant story is to create a range of experiences for different customer personas that enable the business to reach new segments that will give them the flexibility that will fuel the growth of the business. The ultimate goal is to create what I’ll refer to as a “tiered” experience that makes an overt attempt to segregate your solution into different experiences that offer different levels of value at different price points.

You can imagine how this notion of tiering has specific mappings into the multi-tenant strategies that are applied to your solution. Deployment, throughput, isolation, noisy neighbor—the topics we’ve been talking about all throughout this book—all represent different knobs and dials that ...