The three main qualities that any firm seeks in their applications are flexibility, scalability, and ease of customization. A SaaS architecture is the only option that can satisfy these needs. Learn about its architecture types, models, and advantages for a successful market expansion.
2. Table of Contents
What is SaaS?
Key SaaS components
Types of architecture for SaaS applications
Broad categories: Based on industry and functionality coverage
SaaS tenancy models: Based on component shareability
Models of multi-tenant architecture
Why choose SaaS architecture?
Pick your SaaS architecture
3. What is SaaS?
Reason 1
Why is “now” the best time for your
company to rise and go to the next level?
Reason 2
What are the trends these days that make
your product or service possible?
A unique infrastructure
Subscription-based billing model
A CRM system
Automated provisioning
Support and Analytics
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a web-based software
application delivered to the end-users through the internet.
SaaS providers maintain application servers, database
layers, and code base that makes up the entire application.
Key SaaS components:
4. Types of architecture for SaaS applications
Vertical SaaS
Horizontal SaaS
Single-Tenant Architecture
Multi-Tenant Architecture
Mixed-Tenant Architecture
Broad categories: Based on industry and functionality coverage
SaaS tenancy models: Based on component shareability
5. Broad categories: Based on industry and functionality
coverage
Vertical SaaS
A vertical SaaS is a variety of SaaS architecture created for specific industry verticals.
These industries include healthcare, real estate, agriculture, finance, logistics, retail, and many more.
Horizontal SaaS applications focus more on functionality than on industry requirements.
This type of SaaS architecture focuses on a software category, irrespective of the clients’ industry.
Horizontal SaaS
6. SaaS tenancy models: Based on component shareability
Single-Tenant Architecture
A single-tenant architecture serves a single customer who is paying for that software service.
The architecture greatly benefits buyers since they don’t have to share their database resources with other
customers.
Multi-tenant architecture is one of the most preferred types of architecture while designing a SaaS
application because of its core characteristics.
This means, all the clients share a common database and application information – with the exception that
every tenant’s data are secured.
Multi-Tenant Architecture
Within this model, one or two parts of the application are dedicated to each tenant, while the rest of the
components are shared between all the tenants.
Mixed-Tenant Architecture
7. Models of multi-
tenant
architecture
1. Database per tenant
In this model, a tenant does get their own database, however, these databases in
the same resource groups are divisible into flexible pools.
2. Single multi-tenant database
Similar to the multi-tenant architecture, this model simply consists of multiple tenant
identifier columns within the database.
3. Sharded multi-tenant database
With a growing workload on a multi-tenant database, sharding splits tenant data
and stores it across multiple databases.
4. Hybrid sharded multi-tenant database
A hybrid sharded multi-tenant database can be defined as a model where the
vendor has the flexibility to move tenants or a group of tenants into dedicated or
sharded databases.
8. Why choose SaaS Architecture?
SaaS Customer benefits:
Offers reliable digital services over the internet.
Provides a certain degree of flexibility for
customization and maintenance.
An elastic billing and subscription policy.
Cost-efficient software services compared to
traditional software licenses.
Lets customers activate or disable services as
per their convenience.
SaaS Business benefits:
Offers scalable services to a global customer
base.
Eliminates maintenance and test costs.
Vendors push updates quickly.
Reduces time to market a product.
A public cloud lowers maintenance and
infrastructure costs.
A survey revealed that SaaS applications make up 70% of a company’s total software usage. This
means that the popularity of SaaS is growing, and the demand is here to stay for a long time.