Zhi Hu Wang

A Framework for Native Multi-Tenancy Application Development and Management

Multi-tenancy technology is one of key competencies for network delivery services to achieve higher profit margin by leveraging the economic of scale. This paper explores the requirements and challenges of the native multi-tenancy pattern which have the potential of serving a large volume of clients simultaneously. We provide a framework with a set of multi-tenancy common services to help people design and implement a high quality native multi-tenant application more efficiently. Due to the essential requirement to guarantee service quality with high share efficiency, we present approaches and principles to support better isolations among tenants in many aspects such as security, performance, availability, administration etc. We have already achieved many hand on experiences by applying parts of the design and principles into a real multi-tenant application, and identified some future research points to better safeguard the quality of service for each tenant.

A Study and Performance Evaluation of the Multi-Tenant Data Tier Design Patterns for Service Oriented Computing

Multi-tenancy is one of key characteristics of the service oriented computing especially for Software as a Service (SaaS) to leverage economy of scale to drive down total cost of ownership for both service consumer and provider. This paper aims to study the technologies to build a cost-effective, secure and scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, especially in data tier. We first explore all the key implementation patterns of data tier multi-tenancy on aspects of isolation, security, customization & scalability etc. Furthermore, we mainly evaluate the performance of these design patterns on aspects of isolation and security via a series of experiments and simulations. This paper also identifies the potential performance bottlenecks, summarizes corresponding optimization approaches and best implementation practices for different multi-tenant business usage models.

An Effective Heuristic for On-line Tenant Placement Problem in SaaS

As one of the key characteristics of Software as a Service (SaaS), multi-tenancy aims to support massive customers by sharing application instances and databases. To achieve the high economies of scale, one of the most issues needing to be solved in the real industry is that, given a fixed number of nodes, how to optimally place on-boarding tenants to maximize the total supported number of tenants without violating their SLA requirements. This paper focuses on this problem, which is called On-line Tenant Placement Problem (OTPP). In order to calculate the resource consumption of on-boarding tenants, a novel resource consumption estimation model for multi-tenant pattern is proposed in this paper. Based on this model, we explore the complexity of OTPP. A robust heuristic is proposed for the OTPP. The simulation experimental results show the high effectiveness and the good efficiency of our algorithm.

A Non-intrusive Multi-tenant Database Software for Large Scale SaaS Application

Multi-tenant is a key characteristic for cost effective Software as a Service (SaaS) applications which drive down total cost of ownership for both service consumers and providers. This paper describes our research in designing & building a cost-effective, secure, customizable, scalable and non-intrusive multi-tenant database which greatly accelerates the migration and development of SaaS applications. We analyze the requirements and gaps in traditional database when supporting SaaS scenario, and then propose a novel nonintrusive multi-tenant database framework to address these challenges. Some key considerations and different implementation approaches in designing and implementation such a framework are discussed and compared. This paper also identifies some potential database performance optimization approaches in the multi-tenant scenario.