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What are the best practices in building applications that support multiple tenants such as Software as a Service?
Links to white papers that expand on this topic are greatly appreciated.
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The primary concern is how to ensure that proper security and isolation protects consumers or tenants of these services from the risks they pose to one another.
In a multi-tenant architecture, multiple instances of an application operate in a shared environment. This architecture is able to work because each tenant is integrated physically, but logically separated; meaning that a single instance of the software will run on one server and then serve multiple tenants.
For the database:
A. Put everything on the same database, put a tenant_id column on your tables
Pros: Easy to do
Cons: Very prone to bugs: it's easy to leak data from one tenant to another.
B. Put everything on the same database, but put each tenant in its own namespace (postgresql calls them schemas)
Pros: Provides better data leak protection than option A
Cons: Not supported by all databases. AFAIK PostgreSQL and Oracle supports it.
C. Setup one database per tenant
Pros: Absolutely no chance of data leaking from one tenant to another
Cons: Setting up new tenants is more complicated. Database connections are expensive.
I only learned the above ideas from Guy Naor. Here's a link to his presentation: http://aac2009.confreaks.com/06-feb-2009-14-30-writing-multi-tenant-applications-in-rails-guy-naor.html
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You might find some valuable advise in a series of blog posts by Oren Eini.
This is one of the last posts in the series, with links to previous posts: http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/08/16/Multi-Tenancy--Approaches-and-Applicability.aspx
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