A service framework for multi-tenant enterprise application in SaaS environments

In recent years, Software as a service (SaaS), a service model for cloud computing, has received a lot of attention. As designing a multi-tenant enterprise application in SaaS environments is a non-trival task, we propose a service framework to deal with three common issues for designing multi-tenant enterprise SaaS applications: tenant context storage and propagation, schema-mapping, and the integration of ORM framework. A prototype and a sample SaaS application have been implemented to verify the feasibility of our framework. In addition, two tenant-specific virtual applications are constructed to demonstrate multi-tenancy. Finally, we conduct a set of experiments to assess the overheads of making an enterprise application multi-tenant enabled.