I'm looking for some guidance on my research to building an SaaS. This thread seems to be related, but I'm wondering if this software Rackspace has called rBuilder is what I would be looking for to automate the process of creating an instance of the software with a unique IP address and domain name.
Also, for an application similar to Shopify, does the application work like Facebook where it serves up different information based on the account, or is it better to have separate installs of the software like WordPress, but on a server that you maintain?
IMHO, there are various levels of Multi-tenancy [level1 through level4], among them, the purest form of multi-tenancy [Level4] is to have a single code base to cater to the needs of different customers [tenant's].
In this case, you will be required to maintain all of the configuration metadata within your code base to ensure that each tenant has the capability to customize the application the way they wanted to.
Having a single codebase is very clean, easier to maintain, easy to patch, easy to onboard new customers etc...
Hence, kindly note that you have to decide on the time and expense that you have budgeted for the application that you have planned to as the purest form of multi-tenancy does require some more additional thought process.
You can consult some articles like this and also google on the pros and con's of having the purest form of multi-tenancy vs on-premise model or virtualized model of multi-tenancy.
Also read more from here
Related
Visualization tools like tableau, looker, apache superset are not supposed to be used for multi tenant products.
For example. A product with 1000's of users would like analytics on their data. This needs to be secure so company A cannot see other company B visualizations. For this to work these tools need to understand if a user has privileges to view the data. This is usually achieved through cookies after the user has logged in
To ensure data is only accessed by authorized users these third party tools should not be used. Instead sticking to Ruby on Rails with d3js, highcharts etc is the best options. The data can be managed a lot easier through the same authentication methods as you login and so the data is secure.
Actually, Looker handles multi-tenant data situation just fine. It is quite a common use case for Looker.
You can bind attributes to users that will force the right SQL to be written to guarantee that the user only sees appropriate data.
https://docs.looker.com/reference/explore-params/access_filter
We've got lots of customers building extranets for their businesses this way.
Disclosure: I work at looker.
The complexity of multi-tenant deployments goes far beyond the setup of some filter:
Data privacy - you are one typo away from a data privacy breach with the filters. You should use the database security and privacy capabilities to isolate your tenants.
Performance - you need to scale the underlying database to handle the load of concurrent users.
Customization - your tenants might need to load and analyze their own custom data. They need custom reports, etc.
Take a look at gooddata.com and their workspaces.
Disclosure: I work at GoodData
I'm in the process of designing a cloud deployed website for a new solution my company is looking to provide. I have been attempting to answer a few questions and haven't had any luck, so when in rome.
First, I don't want the website to be stuck to any one particular framework. I know there is no way to completely future proof a website, but I would rather not put all of our eggs in one basket.
Secondly, I want to have a separation between the front and back end entirely. I have a list of reasons why I'm looking to do this, don't necessarily want to get into the conversation of what they are. Server Side rendering for the most part is out of the question.
So where does that leave me?
My initial thoughts on the design are to have a REST API that can be accessed for any API calls (this may be turned to GraphQL in the future).
The design decisions that I'm mostly wresting with are for the front end. The website will be a dashboard type system, where tenants can log in and see screens for them.
I was thinking that I would have a sort of shell, that hooks on to the index.html. This would have it's own routing, that would render micro-applications that are completely separate from the shell logic.
So for example, if I load index.html, path being "/"
It has some routes that it's responsible for, lets say
"/todos"
"/account"
If I accessed the /todos route, my shell application would then render that micro app. This application would be completely separate from the shell, except some data that might be loaded via the window. Once this application is rendered via the shell application.
So my todos route, for example, could be a redux application that's independent. It could have it's own routing, etc.
Is this is a common architecture? Are there any examples of this? Is there a better way of going about this?
Thanks for any insight!
Sounds like your well and truly over engineering this beast.
You may take on such an architecture for a HUGE build with many dev teams all working separately. Small agile team, the above would create so much overhead in boilerplate and brain ache in context switching between each "app"
Micro-service architecture is seriously great. Just don't break it up too small, read your use case well and break your services up accordingly.
For example: we are a team of 3. We have a pretty large-ish app devised into:
Php API
Backend management interface (redux)
Frontend website (html, react, php)
Search service (elastic search)
Cache (redis)
Data store (mysql)
All on running in multiple docker containers across multiple hosts. Pull down the backend.. Fine the frontend website is still up and running!
There are a ton of online CMS services out there. And a ton of (new) backend-as-a-service products too. But I can't seem to find what I am looking for.
I am building an app for a client. The app contains data about shops, products, and more. The client must be able to update this data (and not just one person: each shop manager needs to be able to log in and edit the data for their own shop). And of course the app must be able to access this data.
Client edits data online
This has to be extremely user-friendly and completely online. I don't want to sell my client something where they need to install stuff on their server. I don't want to sell them something that's accessible online but looks like phpMyAdmin.
I want a shop owner to be able to go to a webpage, log in, and then see a pretty UI where they can edit the data for their shop. The back-end needs to have a pretty front-end that's auto-generated for whatever data this particular shop owner is allowed to edit.
So there are two bits: storing data in the cloud in such a way that it can be accessed by the app (which I am building with Titanium), and allowing the client to log into the backend and edit the data in a non-tech, user-friendly way.
Here's a list of things I tried...
Backend-as-a-service
Services with a great back-end, but without easy auto-generated data editing website:
Appcelerator (Titanium) Cloud Service
Amazon EC2
Stackmob
BackBeam
WebVanta
Parse
API o Mat
ShepHertz Cloud42
Kii
Online CMS
Services that provide a nice way for clients to edit data, but no easy way for apps to connect:
CloudCMS
(and many others I'm sure)
It's insane that no-one seems to be providing the cross-breed of BaaS and online CMS. So many people are building apps for clients, and so many clients are not tech-savvy and are reluctant to get a special server and host database software they don't understand. Why does this not exist? What am I missing?
With apiOmat it's easy to create your own data-editing app for e.g. with JavaScript SDK and HTML. Or you send a feature request so that they build a module for your preferred CMS.
As you mentioned, Cloud CMS is a really good option (disclaimer: I'm one of the founders). The product provides an enterprise content management backend and an API that lets you plug in some really powerful features right into your mobile apps.
This month, we released a brand new user interface which provides much of what you're asking about. Instant forms, document libraries, search and workflow all in one place.
You can check out Cloud CMS here: http://www.cloudcms.com
I completely agree with your assessment particularly with respect to the last mile (getting the final app built). It's kind of the wild west out there and the strong technologies are still proving out.
You mentioned Titanium - that's a good choice. I also quite like the Ionic Framework (http://www.drifty.com/). It's a step in the right direction.
I'm looking at implemented a muli-tenant portal solution for my SaaS application using Orchard CMS. I'm pleased that it appears multi-tenancy is a first class feature, but it looks like in order to achieve it, I've got to either a) Create a set of tables for each tenant with a table prefix or b) Have separate databases for each tenant.
I'm trying to build a solution for 10,000+ customers, and so anything that requires me to make physical data schema changes per tenant won't scale. In our SaaS application, we use a tenantID column on all tables, plus the use of nHibernate filters and a heck of a lot of indexes to allow us to scale.
I'd like to do the same in Orchard. So instead of a table for each tenant, I'd like ONE set of tables with a tenantID, and then use filters in the data access layer (NHib) to always pull the right data.
Questions:
1) Is this possible?
2) Has anyone done this?
3) Any thoughts on the best way? I was going to modify the MultiTenancy/NHiberate module source directly.
It is possible, but quite hard to do.
It's also most likely not a scenario for Orchard multi-tenancy, but without any further details I cannot be sure.
This feature fits best in cases where you need to have a totally independent applications and (almost) nothing is supposed to be shared between them - like in shared hosting, for instance. The major drawback is the memory overhead, because each tenant has its own copy of the whole internal object infrastructure.
A much easier approach, instead of trying to put a square peg in a round hole tweaking multi-tenancy, would be to use single tenant and implement your desired multi-tenancy scheme in a separate module on your own, from scratch. You could eg. have a "Tenant" content type and build your module around it.
In search of a 'Cloud Content Management System' like http://osmek.com/,
I could not find a single other CCMS that does what I want it to do :)
Basically, what I need is content management without a website frontend attached.
Just basic storage of data, documents, images, etc. etc. with a simple API to access, like Osmek. Just NoSQL or SQL based services won't do, because there can be images or documents attached. And, ofcourse, I'd like to have a backend to manage the data (like a typical CMS does) without writing a backend myself (if it's just the service)
Osmek is great, and it works most awesome in conjunction with Actionscript 3, but I'm just looking / searching for alternatives (if there even are any yet).
I need this form of hosted content management for content-manageing a mobile application.
So the question is: Is there anything else out there that does the same as osmek that you know of? OR, how do you manage application specific content?
Thanks!
I'd encourage you to take a look at Cloud CMS (http://www.cloudcms.com).
Cloud CMS is a JSON content management (CMS) platform built on top of MongoDB with a REST API and drivers for a variety of languages. You just drop in a driver and call methods to query, create, update and delete content.
The platform provides everything you need to power the back-end for mobile and HTML5 applications - from managing your content to managing users and groups, credentials, security tokens (OAuth2), Git-like collaborative workspaces, real-time analytics, activities, data transformations and more.
Everything runs in the cloud on an elastic back-end. It's probably more akin to Parse than a traditional CMS. You just make calls to the APIs. We keep the costs low by letting you only pay for what you use (almost like a utility). You just pay for storage and data transfer.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of Cloud CMS. So I'm a pretty lousy reference in terms of its objective value. However, a couple of us worked at traditional "ECM" companies in the past and we think we've built something that puts a genuine beating on those guys.