Resource calculations with constraints, and placement of tenants and instances for multi-tenant SaaS applications

Abstract

Cost of customization, deployment and operation of a software application supporting multiple tenants can be lowered through multi-tenancy in a new application business model called Software as a Service (SaaS). However, there are a number of technical challenges that need to be tackled before these benefits can be realized. These challenges include calculations of resource requirements for multi-tenants with applied constraints in a shared application instance, the optimal placement of tenants and instances with maximum cost savings but without violating any requirements of service level agreements for all tenants in a set of servers. Moreover, previously reported capacity planning and resource allocation methods and tools are not tenant aware. This paper will address and provide novel solutions to these challenges. We also describe the first of a kind, a multi-tenant placement tool for application deployment in a distributed computing environment. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.