I have worked on SaaS and multitenant based applications. I have segmented application tenants in the database layer at the row, table, and schema levels. Also, done separate databases for each tenant. Each strategy had its pros and cons, but it only addressed data segmentation and I still had to deal with logic segmentation for each tenant.

When a tenant customer wants different or custom functionality how do I segment the logic in such a way to give the tenant what they want without affecting the other tenants. How do we meter and bill for logic? Complex “if” or “case” statements, reflection, dependency injection…? All a bit messy in my opinion.

Having made the leap to microservices we now have the option of separate services per tenant. In the UI layer each tenant can have a different UI that encapsulates the UI’s structure, layout, styling and logic for the tenant. The UI can also have configurable microservices. This is just a list of endpoints that define the microservices necessary to drive the UI. During on-boarding and on an administrative configuration page, tenants can define the functionality they want to use in place of or along side the default functionality by simply selecting from a list of services. We can query the service configuration and monitor service usage to provide customized per tenant metering and billing.

This is not much different than the plug-in strategy you see in content management systems like WordPress and Umbraco. This is just at a different layer of abstraction. Is this better than the other logic segmentation strategies? I don’t know I haven’t done it yet.

Am I excited to try it? Hell yeah. Will I fail while trying it, I hope so because I can learn some new tricks. One thing proper microservices provides is an easier way to reason about an application in bite sized chunks. Also, with end-to-end automation it is easier to experiment. We can fail often, early and fast, fix it, and repeat until we get it right. So, I think it is going to be fun, in a geeky way, to figure this out even though thinking about using GraphQL muddies the waters a bit, but that’s another post.

If you have done multitenant microservices or are interested in doing something similar with microservices, let’s talk about it :).