Container Based Scalability and Performance Analysis of Multitenant SaaS Applications

A multitenant SaaS is a single codebase and run-time customizable application supporting multiple tenants and users. There is a huge demand for multitenant applications as it reduces total cost of ownership for both, service provider as well as consumers. However, Multitenant SaaS applications face fluctuating load problem due to variable tenants and users. Thus, managing resources becomes difficult. Traditionally, to overcome this issue, resources are managed and scaled using monolithic architecture which may lead to underutilization and over utilization of resources in cases of low load and high load respectively. Microservices architecture is a new exemplar for developing cloud SaaS applications as it has several advantages over monolithic. The paper aims to analyze the performance and scalability analysis of multitenant SaaS application using both microservices and monolithic architecture. Utility Booking application is developed for a case study. Scalability analysis is performed, and the performance of application using both approaches is compared using average response time and throughput. Results show that multitenant applications using microservices with large number of concurrent users outperforms monolithic approach and are resource efficient as microservice application scales dynamically based on varying load.