Automated Constraint-Based Multi-tenant SaaS Configuration Support Using XML Filtering Techniques

The use of cloud computing is on the rise because of the cost effectiveness in providing the same resources to different tenants. Highly customizable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provide high scalability and lower cost as a result of multitenant nature of its cloud applications. However, there are several challenges that make its adoption difficult. Some of the weaknesses of current cloud offerings are complex configuration, development, deployment and management. This paper, investigates the different techniques and methods such as adaptation and variation management used to address these challenges. In addition, the details about how techniques from Software Product Line Engineering and Service Oriented Architecture are applied are addressed. Therefore, the paper extends an existing framework for constraint-based configuration management for cloud applications by integrating existing feature modeling tools with a XML filtering tool –Yfilter. The objective of the integration is to automate the process to identify matched tenant-specific requirements with the SaaS cloud application feature model. The automated process results in lower manual efforts and possible errors, and as a result less complex deployment and management of the SaaS application.