Architectural Design of a Deployment Platform to Provision Mixed-tenancy SaaS-Applications

Matthias Reinhardt, Stefan T. Ruehl, Stephan A. W. Verclas, Urs Andelfinger, Alois Schütte

2014

Abstract

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a delivery model whose basic idea is to provide applications to the customer on demand over the Internet. In contrast to similar but older approaches, SaaS promotes multi-tenancy as a tool to exploit economies of scale. This means that a single application instance serves multiple customers. However, a major throwback of SaaS is the customers’ hesitation of sharing infrastructure, application code, or data with other tenants. This is due to the fact that one of the major threats of multi-tenancy is information disclosure due to a system malfunction, system error, or aggressive actions by individual users. So far the only approach in research to counteract on this hesitation has been to enhance the isolation between tenants using the same instance. Our approach (presented in earlier work) tackles this hesitation differently. It allows customers to choose if or even with whom they want to share the application. The approach enables the customer to make that choice not just for the entire application but specifically for individual application components and the underlying infrastructure. This paper contributes to the mixed-tenancy approach by introducing a software pattern that allows to establish communication between Application Components that are deployed following the mixed-tenancy paradigm. The contributions of this paper are evaluated based on a representative example that employs all possible kinds of communication.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Reinhardt M., Ruehl S., Verclas S., Andelfinger U. and Schütte A. (2014). Architectural Design of a Deployment Platform to Provision Mixed-tenancy SaaS-Applications . In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER, ISBN 978-989-758-019-2, pages 395-402. DOI: 10.5220/0004813803950402

in Bibtex Style

@conference{closer14,
author={Matthias Reinhardt and Stefan T. Ruehl and Stephan A. W. Verclas and Urs Andelfinger and Alois Schütte},
title={Architectural Design of a Deployment Platform to Provision Mixed-tenancy SaaS-Applications},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER,},
year={2014},
pages={395-402},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004813803950402},
isbn={978-989-758-019-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER,
TI - Architectural Design of a Deployment Platform to Provision Mixed-tenancy SaaS-Applications
SN - 978-989-758-019-2
AU - Reinhardt M.
AU - Ruehl S.
AU - Verclas S.
AU - Andelfinger U.
AU - Schütte A.
PY - 2014
SP - 395
EP - 402
DO - 10.5220/0004813803950402