Building Multi-Tenant SaaS Architectures • Tod Golding & Bill Tarr • GOTO 2024

Multi-tenancy in SaaS goes beyond just shared infrastructure - it’s about driving growth, agility and delivering value through a service model

The control plane has emerged as a critical architectural component for SaaS, handling tenant onboarding, routing, identity and operational management separate from the application plane

SaaS requires a mindset shift across the entire organization - it’s not just a technical implementation but requires alignment between business, product, and engineering teams

Tenant isolation and routing strategies need careful consideration - options like siloed vs pooled resources and cell-based architectures provide different approaches for scalability and tenant separation

Operational insights and monitoring become more critical in multi-tenant environments - need robust tools to understand tenant behavior, resource usage, and system health

Automation of tenant onboarding and management is essential for scaling SaaS effectively - manual processes don’t work at scale

Tiering strategies need to consider both business and technical aspects - different service tiers may require different architectural approaches

Global scale and compliance requirements are pushing evolution of deployment models - cell-based architectures and regional deployments are becoming more common

Gen AI is emerging as a key consideration for SaaS architecture - impacts pricing models, resource sharing, and tenant isolation strategies

Success metrics for SaaS need to go beyond traditional product metrics - must include operational efficiency, tenant satisfaction, and business agility measures