A proposed resource sharing architecture for multitenant SaaS applications

Abstract

In today’s era of cloud computing technology, Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of the most widely adopted services by the customers. In a SaaS scenario, both service providers and customers yield tremendous economy of scale. Service providers deliver a single application instance among multiple organizations resulting in reduced operational and maintenance cost. They, in turn offer the service at a lower cost to customers. This has become possible by embedding a promising multitenant architecture in the development of SaaS applications, where multiple organizations referred as tenants share a common application instance and in turn a common database. However, designing such multitenant applications for its effective delivery to thousands of customer pose several challenges in the arena of resource sharing, security, scalability etc. This work in particular attempts to address the problem of fixed resource allocation through virtualized instances among tenants and propose a possible dynamic resource sharing architecture that can support in extemporizing resource usage nonetheless maintaining service level agreement requirements and isolation among tenants.