{"title":"Continuous Evolution of Multi-tenant SaaS Applications: A Customizable Dynamic Adaptation Approach","authors":"Fatih Gey, D. Landuyt, W. Joosen, V. Jonckers","doi":"10.1109/PESOS.2015.10","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Applying application-level multi-tenancy in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings yields a number of compelling benefits: sharing a single instance of the application between large numbers of customer organizations increases cost efficiency and allows the SaaS provider to attain true economies-of-scale benefits. There is however a main downside to this: increased sharing of resources causes the SaaS application to be very difficult to modify after initial development and deployment without affecting service continuity: any change potentially affects the service levels promised to all enrolled tenant organizations and their end users. This rigidity is a key impediment as now the SaaS provider must evolve and maintain the SaaS offering at run time, on a gradual, per-tenant basis. This in turn causes a reality of multiple co-existing versions of individual components and as such introduces substantial management complexity. To address these challenges, this paper motivates and defines key requirements that allows per-tenant, SLA-aware and gradual upgrades in the context of multi-tenant SaaS applications. In addition, we define an approach that allows the involved stakeholders (tenants, SaaS operators, SaaS developers, etc.) to customize the dynamic enactment of upgrades, and provide a number of alternative software upgrade strategies that represent different service quality trade-offs.","PeriodicalId":215291,"journal":{"name":"2015 IEEE/ACM 7th International Workshop on Principles of Engineering Service-Oriented and Cloud Systems","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2015-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"11","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"2015 IEEE/ACM 7th International Workshop on Principles of Engineering Service-Oriented and Cloud Systems","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1109/PESOS.2015.10","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 11
Abstract
Applying application-level multi-tenancy in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings yields a number of compelling benefits: sharing a single instance of the application between large numbers of customer organizations increases cost efficiency and allows the SaaS provider to attain true economies-of-scale benefits. There is however a main downside to this: increased sharing of resources causes the SaaS application to be very difficult to modify after initial development and deployment without affecting service continuity: any change potentially affects the service levels promised to all enrolled tenant organizations and their end users. This rigidity is a key impediment as now the SaaS provider must evolve and maintain the SaaS offering at run time, on a gradual, per-tenant basis. This in turn causes a reality of multiple co-existing versions of individual components and as such introduces substantial management complexity. To address these challenges, this paper motivates and defines key requirements that allows per-tenant, SLA-aware and gradual upgrades in the context of multi-tenant SaaS applications. In addition, we define an approach that allows the involved stakeholders (tenants, SaaS operators, SaaS developers, etc.) to customize the dynamic enactment of upgrades, and provide a number of alternative software upgrade strategies that represent different service quality trade-offs.