Title: A scalable component model for multi-tenant SaaS application

Authors: M.D. Samrajesh; N.P. Gopalan; S. Suresh

Addresses: Research and Development Centre, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, 641046, India ' National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, 620015, India ' National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, 620015, India

Abstract: A multi-tenant software as a service (SaaS) application provides a customised run-time application for each tenant using a single application. Multi-tenancy offers various advantages including reduced software development time, lower maintenance cost, effective version control and much more. However, managing large scale resources and providing superior user experience using the underlying resources is a key challenge in the management of SaaS application. Moreover, SaaS applications have fluctuating load based on tenant's users demand. Scalability of application in cloud is one of the foremost requirements in designing and implementing SaaS-based applications. In this paper, we propose an application's component-based scalable component model (SCM), instances of application are created at component level and dynamically scaled based on the component's load considering various factors including tenant users attributes. Our evaluation and discussions show that the proposed multi-instance SCM offers enhanced application load distribution and offers improved application response time and effective utilisation of component instances.

Keywords: auto-scaling; cloud computing; software as a service; multi-tenant SaaS; multi-tenancy; software modelling; scalable component models; application load distribution; application response time.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAIP.2016.075727

International Journal of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms, 2016 Vol.8 No.2, pp.191 - 206

Received: 10 Nov 2014
Accepted: 21 May 2015

Published online: 01 Apr 2016 *

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