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Using Microservices to Customize Multi-Tenant SaaS: From Intrusive to Non-Intrusive

Abstract

Customization is a widely adopted practice on enterprise software applications such as Enterprise resource planning (ERP) or Customer relation management (CRM). Software vendors deploy their enterprise software product on the premises of a customer, which is then often customized for different specific needs of the customer. When enterprise applications are moving to the cloud as mutli-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the traditional way of on-premises customization faces new challenges because a customer no longer has an exclusive control to the application. To empower businesses with specific requirements on top of the shared standard SaaS, vendors need a novel approach to support the customization on the multi-tenant SaaS. In this paper, we summarize our two approaches for customizing multi-tenant SaaS using microservices: intrusive and non-intrusive. The paper clarifies the key concepts related to the problem of multi-tenant customization, and describes a design with a reference architecture and high-level principles. We also discuss the key technical challenges and the feasible solutions to implement this architecture. Our microservice-based customization solution is promising to meet the general customization requirements, and achieves a balance between isolation, assimilation and economy of scale.
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Category

Academic chapter

Language

English

Author(s)

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Digital / Sustainable Communication Technologies

Year

2020

Publisher

Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik

Book

Joint Post-proceedings of the First and Second International Conference on Microservices (Microservices 2017/2019)

ISBN

9783959771375

Page(s)

1 - 18

View this publication at Norwegian Research Information Repository