Abstract
Enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and other enterprise solutions are not used out of the box: Companies hire consultants to customize these software solutions that are deployed “on premises” to fit their specific business processes. When software vendors move to multitenant software-as-a-service (SaaS), they cannot onboard their customers who heavily customized their “on-premises” installation. In SaaS, all customers share the same source code and computing resources to ensure economies of scale. We present here a novel approach to support SaaS customization using microservices architectures: Each customization is encapsulated as a microservice that replaces the standard functionality. We evaluated the feasibility of our approach on two industrial studies of ERP and CRM service vendors and discussed different design choices. The results of our experiments show that our approach can achieve both the isolation required by multitenancy and the assimilation required by deep customization.