Study Of Multi-Tenancy Technologies In SOA Enviornments

Recently, SaaS (Software as a Service) becomes more and more popular pattern in enterprise application software & service domain. Multi-tenancy technology is one of the key technologies for the success of SaaS applications. The target of Multi-tenancy technologies is to share hardware/software resources among multiple tenants, so as to reduce the on-boarding, operation and management cost of SaaS applications. However, because of the large complexity of the technologies, there is still no general methodology and practices to resolve this problem well. Furthermore, in native multi-tenancy environments, since all tenants share a same application instance, the high requirements on security, customization and management isolation become more difficult, which obviously proposed great challenge to those SaaS application architects and developers. On the other hand, the capability to easily adopt the dynamic business requirements changes makes SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) a high potential architecture for SaaS application development.In this paper, we explore the potential design principle and practice of multi-tenancy technologies in SOA environments, and propose a novel application level programming model and framework to enable the SOA based native multi-tenancy application development effectively. In this framework, a multi-tenancy enhancement layer is provided to isolate those multi-tenancy sensitive resources and business processes, and thus divided the developers into two categories. First, Multi-tenancy awareness developers focus on mapping the multi-tenancy sensitive resources with the isolation layer by using the third party interface we provided. Secondly, Multi-tenancy unawareness developers, such as UI designer, business logics developer etc, needn't to care about the details of multi-tenancy technologies. By following some simple programming interface, they can easily transform their applications as multi-tenancy enabled. To sum up, the merits of the programming model proposed in this paper mainly includes: 1) most of developers will focus on the design and implementation of their key business logics, while not involving the details of multi-tenancy technologies; 2) make the SaaS application more easily maintenance and reused by separating the multi-tenancy enhancement codes from those business logics. Finally, the programming model has already been proved as a practical and effective method by some real SaaS application development.