Using DSML for Handling Multi-tenant Evolution in Cloud Applications

Multi-tenancy is sharing a single application's resources to serve more than a single group of users (i.e. tenant). Cloud application providers are encouraged to adopt multi-tenancy as it facilitates increased resource utilization and ease of maintenance, translating into lower operational and energy costs. However, introducing multi-tenancy to a single-tenant application requires significant changes in its structure to ensure tenant isolation, configurability and extensibility. In this paper, we analyse and address the different challenges associated with evolving an application's architecture to a multi-tenant cloud deployment. We focus specifically on multi-tenant data architectures, commonly the prime candidate for consolidation and multi-tenancy. We present a Domain-Specific Modeling language (DSML) to model a multi-tenant data architecture, and automatically generate source code that handles the evolution of the application's data layer. We apply the DSML on a representative case study of a single-tenant application evolving to become a multi-tenant cloud application under two resource sharing scenarios. We evaluate the costs associated with using this DSML against the state of the art and against manual evolution, reporting specifically on the gained benefits in terms of development effort and reliability.