Towards a framework for building SaaS applications operating in diverse and dynamic environments

Abstract

Enterprises have increasingly adopted the Software-as-aservice (SaaS) model to facilitate on-demand delivery of software applications. A SaaS customer - tenant - may operate in diverse environments and may demand a different level of qualities from the application. A tenant may also operate in a dynamic environment where expectations from the application may change at run-time. To be able to operate in such environments, SaaS application requires support at both the architecture and implementation levels. This paper highlights the issues in building a SaaS that can accommodate such diverse and dynamic environments. We propose a methodological framework called Chameleonic-SaaS that abstracts out the responsibilities involved and provides guidelines to realize it. Our framework introduces variability in the architecture to manipulate the architecture-level decisions, especially tactics. Feasibility of the framework is demonstrated by an example of a MOOC application.