A Methodology for Tenant Migration in Legacy Shared-Table Multi-tenant Applications.

Multi-tenancy enables cost-effective SaaS through resource consolidation. Multiple customers, or tenants, are served by a single application instance, and isolation is enforced at the application level. Service load for different tenants can vary over time, requiring applications to scale in and out. A large class of SaaS providers operates legacy applications structured around a relational (SQL) database. These applications achieve tenant isolation through dedicated fields in their relational schema and are not designed to support scaling operations. We present a novel solution for scaling in or out such applications through the migration of a tenant’s data to new application and database instances. Our solution requires no change to the application and incurs no service downtime for non-migrated tenants. It leverages external tables and foreign data wrappers, as supported by major relational databases. We evaluate the approach using two multi-tenant applications: Iomad, an extension of the Moodle Learning Management System, and Camunda, a business process management platform. Our results show the usability of the method, minimally impacting performance for other tenants during migration and leading to increased service capacity after migration.