Building Multi-Tenant SaaS Architectures

Chapter 17. Guiding Principles

Throughout this book, I’ve tried to surface a mix of SaaS technical and business principles, highlighting key concepts that have a direct influence on how you approach designing, building, and operating a SaaS business. In some respects, having a firm grasp of these foundational concepts is almost more important than knowing all the nuances of how multi-tenancy might land in your underlying implementation. It’s these concepts that guide and help you determine which strategies you should be considering, which questions you should be asking the business, and which multi-tenant patterns are going to best align with the needs of your business. Given the importance of some of these principles, I thought it would be valuable to have one dedicated chapter that would focus exclusively on this guidance.

I’ve picked three areas that represent a good grouping of these principles. The first part of the chapter starts by looking at strategy, vision, and structure. So much of succeeding with SaaS is driven by having a clear, unifying view of what your SaaS goals are, what it means to be SaaS, and how you’re organizing and measuring teams around a clear service-centric mindset and strategy. I outline a range of principles, all focused on areas where I often see organizations struggle to achieve top-down alignment.

The next part of the chapter focuses more on technical principles. Here, I’m looking more at strategies and mental models that can influence how builders ...