Component-based design for multi-tenant multi-target support in the cloud

Abstract

In cloud environments of today, characterized by steadily evolving markets and technology improvements, some issues such as price, time-to-market, reaction to change as well as rapid software delivery and deployment, have become the touchstones for the success of current information systems. As a key issue to support these goals, Multi-tenant Architectures emerge as a technology that permits different customers (a.k.a. tenants) to be consolidated into the same operational system while sharing certain component of the underlying supporting software. In these shared environments, architectural aspects like system scalability, performance and data privacy should be carefully studied and delegated in every system component. Likewise, the design and implementation of administrative frameworks that assist the monitoring and management of the multiple customers (tenants) in the system is also crucial. In this paper, we introduce a component-based extension to the Multi-tenant Architecture model as well as the principles behind the design of a Multi-tenancy Multi-target (MT2) architecture and its benefits for software developers, vendors and clients. The applicability of the proposal is illustrated by means of a real MT2 implementation, called Globalgest.