Hierarchical multi-tenancy in business to business software services

Abdul, A and Bass, J ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0570-7086 2018, Hierarchical multi-tenancy in business to business software services , in: 44th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, 29-31 August 2018, Prague, Czech Republic.

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Abstract

The introduction of cloud computing has changed the provisioning and consumption of IT resources. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications provide functionality using internet connectivity and enable centralised management of executable code resources. Multi-tenancy is an architectural pattern for sharing a single instance of executable software while isolating the data and business process serving each tenant. In a multi-tenant application, a tenant is a logical grouping of end-users who share common code, data and process instances. Multi-tenancy can cut across all the layers of an application software architecture.

Conventionally, multi-tenancy is implemented as a flat structure. All tenants are treated in the same way by application software. However, large enterprises are hierarchically organised with defined boundaries between business and functional units. A SaaS solution, aimed at large enterprise users, needs to reflect these hierarchical boundaries to eliminate duplication of functional software but enforce data and business process separation.

This paper introduces a novel hierarchical multi-tenancy architecture for an enterprise-scale business-to-business (B2B) cloud hosted software service application. Organisational hierarchy plays a vital role in grouping end users into tenants and subtenants in our software. A new reference architectural style for implementing hierarchical multi-tenant application is presented here for the first time.

We use a case study approach to empirically evaluate the latency of this architecture in comparison to known flat multitenancy patterns. Our experimental evaluation supports the hypothesis that the hierarchical multi-tenancy approach meets the needs of our application and improves its performance.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Schools:	Schools > School of Computing, Science and Engineering > Salford Innovation Research Centre
Journal or Publication Title:	Proceedings, 44th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications
Publisher:	IEEE
Related URLs:	Organisation
Depositing User:	Dr Julian M. Bass
Date Deposited:	04 Sep 2018 08:13
Last Modified:	14 Oct 2019 10:03
URI:	http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/48198

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