Authors:
Matthias Reinhardt
1
;
Stefan T. Ruehl
2
;
Stephan A. W. Verclas
3
;
Urs Andelfinger
1
and
Alois Schütte
1
Affiliations:
1
University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt, Germany
;
2
Clausthal University of Technology, Germany
;
3
T-Systems International GmbH, Germany
Keyword(s):
Software Architecture, Software Design, Web and Internet Services.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Cloud Application Architectures
;
Cloud Computing
;
Cloud Computing Architecture
;
Fundamentals
;
Platforms and Applications
Abstract:
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a delivery model whose basic idea is to provide applications to the customer on
demand over the Internet. In contrast to similar but older approaches, SaaS promotes multi-tenancy as a tool to
exploit economies of scale. This means that a single application instance serves multiple customers. However,
a major throwback of SaaS is the customers’ hesitation of sharing infrastructure, application code, or data with
other tenants. This is due to the fact that one of the major threats of multi-tenancy is information disclosure
due to a system malfunction, system error, or aggressive actions by individual users. So far the only approach
in research to counteract on this hesitation has been to enhance the isolation between tenants using the same
instance. Our approach (presented in earlier work) tackles this hesitation differently. It allows customers to
choose if or even with whom they want to share the application. The approach enables the customer to make
t
hat choice not just for the entire application but specifically for individual application components and the
underlying infrastructure. This paper contributes to the mixed-tenancy approach by introducing a software
pattern that allows to establish communication between Application Components that are deployed following
the mixed-tenancy paradigm. The contributions of this paper are evaluated based on a representative example
that employs all possible kinds of communication.
(More)