Tagged: multitenant

Thoughts on Multitenant Microservices

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 :).

Multitenant Thoughts

I am building my 3rd multitenant SAAS solution. I am not referencing any of my earlier work because I think they were way more work than they should have been. Also, I have since moved on from the whole ASP.net web forms development mindset and I want to start with a fresh perspective instead of trying to improve my big balls of spaghetti code.

Today, my thoughts center around enforcing the inclusion and processing of a tenant ID in every command and query. My tenant model keeps all tenant data in a shared database and tables. To keep everything segregated every time I write data and read data there has to be a tenant ID included so that we don’t mess with the wrong tenants data.

I have seen all kinds of solutions for this, some more complicating than I care to tackle at this moment. I am currently leaning towards enforcing it in the data repository.

I am using a generic repository for CRUD operations and an event repository for async event driven workflows. In the repository API’s I want to introduce a validated parameter for tenant ID in every write and read operation. This will force all clients to provide the ID when they call the repos.

I just have to update a couple classes in the repos to enforce inclusion of the tenant ID when I write data. Also, every read will use the tenant ID to scope the result set to a specific tenant’s data. I already have a proof of concept for this app so this change will cause a breaking change in my existing clients, but still not a lot of work considering the fact that I almost decided to enforce the tenant ID in a layer higher than the repo, which would have been a maintenance nightmare.

Is this best practice? No. I don’t think there is a best practice besides the fact that you should use a tenant ID to segregate tenant data in a shared data store. This solution works for my problem and I am able to maintain it in just a couple classes. If the problem changes I can look into the fancy solutions I read about.

Now, how will I resolve the tenant ID? Sub-folder, sub-domain, query string, custom domain…?