Multi-Tenant SaaS Applications: Maintenance Dream or Nightmare? Position paper

Multi-tenancy is a relatively new software architecture principle in the realm of the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model. It allows to make full use of the economy of scale, as multiple customers –“tenants”– share the same application and database instance. All the while, the tenants enjoy a highly configurable application, making it appear that the application is deployed on a dedicated server. The major benefits of multi-tenancy are increased utilization of hardware resources and improved ease of maintenance, in particular on the deployment side. These benefits should result in lower overall application costs, making the technology attractive for service providers targeting small and medium enterprises (SME). However, as this paper advocates, a wrong architectural choice might entail that multitenancy becomes a maintenance nightmare.