Migrating Single-Tenant to Multi-Tenant application

0
votes

We are upgrading a single-tenant application to a multi-tenant (separate DB for each client) SaaS application. My responsibility is to design the tenant provisioning part. I am thinking of the following steps.

  1. While our admin will install our software, one DB should always be get created.Argument for this step is that Admin will install the software only when at least a tenant comes up. So, creation of a single db as part of installation of our software should make sense.

  2. The common meta data will be stored in a common place. We are thinking of using ZooKeepar to store the common meta data.

  3. Each tenant will be given a subdomain. For example www..samplaTenent.com . This tenant_id will be extracted from the URL in each request and will be used to identify the particular tenant and respective DB.

  4. If more tenants need to be provisioned, the admin will create a new DB instance through user interface.

Technology used:

  1. Java 6
  2. Struts Framework
  3. MS SQL

Now, I would like to get expert opinion about the proposed solutions. Is there any other way by which we can build a robust, secure and scale-able SaaS application?

Thanks.

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multi-tenant

1 Answers

1
votes

IMHO, I would suggest that you should have a sibgle code base that can handle the multi-tenancy aspects be it configuration of db, settings per tenant etc.. I am not aware of the code base that you have now. Hence, you can make the provisioning part as follows,

  1. You provision a new tenant by getting all the prerequisite info. You can generate the URL for this tenant automatically or allow the tenant to choose one in the latter a validation has to be made for the URL and the tenant combination.

  2. On this step completion, you can have some scripts at the server that clones a master code base and rolls out a new tenant specific db. So things are automated.

  3. The next step will be to store the tenant db and the app details in your common or shared db so that when a tenant logs in, you can redirect him to his URL. The db details will be required if you want to handle all of the tenant and his user authentication from the main app.

  4. The main perceived advantage of having a single code base is that the customization and configuration can be in one place with ease of code maintenance and bug fixing or enhancing. Though this may not work for all scenarios, this is what I feel more suitable option on the long run.

Please share your thoughts or post additional queries that you may have on multi-tenancy.