Multi-tenant Quality Attributes to Manage Tenants in SaaS Applications

A Software-as-a-Service offering provides ready to use solutions for its tenants. Tenants having different quality requirements are deployed on separate dedicated instances. The concerns related to generating variable quality responses using single instance are not explicitly handled in current design approaches. A lack of standardized tactics and design guidelines also make it difficult for an architect to embed these multi-tenant design decisions at the early stage. In this work, we highlight a few domain-independent architectural concerns that can be used to manage multiple heterogeneous tenants on a shared application instance. We derive some quality requirements that are significant in the multi-tenant scenario, related tactics, measurements and analyze the impact on other software product quality attributes.