TY - JOUR
T1 - Software-as-a-service (SaaS)
T2 - Perspectives and challenges
AU - Tsai, WeiTek T.
AU - Bai, XiaoYing Y.
AU - Huang, Yu
N1 - Funding Information:
This project was sponsored by United States National Science Foundation Project DUE (Grant No. 0942453), National Science Foundation China (Grant No. 61073003), National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2011CB302505), and Open Fund of the State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment (Grant No. SKLSDE-2009KF-2-0X). It is also supported by Fujitsu Laboratory.
PY - 2014/5
Y1 - 2014/5
N2 - Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has received significant attention recently as one of three principal components of cloud computing, and it often deals with applications that run on top of a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that in turn runs on top of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). This paper provides an overview of SaaS including its architecture and major technical issues such as customization, multi-tenancy architecture, redundancy and recovery mechanisms, and scalability. Specifically, a SaaS system can have architecture relating to a database-oriented approach, middleware-oriented approach, service-oriented approach, or PaaS-oriented approach. Various SaaS customization strategies can be used from light customization with manual coding to heavy customization where the SaaS system and its underlying PaaS systems are customized together. Multi-tenancy architecture is an important feature of a SaaS and various trade-offs including security isolation, performance, and engineering effort need to be considered. It is important for a SaaS system to have multi-level redundancy and recovery mechanisms, and the SaaS system needs to coordinate these with the underlying PaaS system. Finally, SaaS scalability mechanisms include a multi-level architecture with load balancers, automated data migration, and software design strategies.
AB - Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has received significant attention recently as one of three principal components of cloud computing, and it often deals with applications that run on top of a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that in turn runs on top of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). This paper provides an overview of SaaS including its architecture and major technical issues such as customization, multi-tenancy architecture, redundancy and recovery mechanisms, and scalability. Specifically, a SaaS system can have architecture relating to a database-oriented approach, middleware-oriented approach, service-oriented approach, or PaaS-oriented approach. Various SaaS customization strategies can be used from light customization with manual coding to heavy customization where the SaaS system and its underlying PaaS systems are customized together. Multi-tenancy architecture is an important feature of a SaaS and various trade-offs including security isolation, performance, and engineering effort need to be considered. It is important for a SaaS system to have multi-level redundancy and recovery mechanisms, and the SaaS system needs to coordinate these with the underlying PaaS system. Finally, SaaS scalability mechanisms include a multi-level architecture with load balancers, automated data migration, and software design strategies.
KW - SaaS architecture
KW - customization
KW - multi-tenancy architecture
KW - redundancy and recovery
KW - scalability
KW - software-as-a-service
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84895778322&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84895778322&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11432-013-5050-z
DO - 10.1007/s11432-013-5050-z
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84895778322
VL - 57
SP - 1
EP - 15
JO - Science China Information Sciences
JF - Science China Information Sciences
SN - 1674-733X
IS - 5
ER -