A Multi-tenant Architecture for Business Process Executions

Cloud computing, as a concept, promises cost savings to end-users by letting them outsource their non-critical business functions to a third party in pay-as-you-go style. However, to enable economic pay-as-you-go services, we need Cloud middleware that maximizes sharing and support near zero costs for unused applications. Multi-tenancy, which let multiple tenants (user) to share a single application instance securely, is a key enabler for building such a middleware. On the other hand, Business processes capture Business logic of organizations in an abstract and reusable manner, and hence play a key role in most organizations. This paper presents the design and architecture of a Multi-tenant Workflow engine while discussing in detail potential use cases of such architecture. Primary contributions of this paper are motivating workflow multi-tenancy, and the design and implementation of multi-tenant workflow engine that enables multiple tenants to run their workflows securely within the same workflow engine instance without modifications to the workflows.