Towards a scalable and robust multi-tenancy SaaS

Software-as-as-Service (SaaS) is a new approach for developing software, and it is characterized by its multi-tenancy architecture and its ability to provide flexible customization to individual tenant. However, the multi-tenancy architecture and customization requirements have brought up new issues in software, such as database design, database partition, scalability, recovery, and continuous testing. This paper proposes a hybrid test database design to support SaaS customization with two-layer database partitioning. The database is further extended with a new built-in redundancy with ontology so that the SaaS can recover from ontology, data or meta-data failures. Furthermore, constraints in metadata can be used either as test cases or policies to support SaaS continuous testing and policy enforcement.