A Combined Workload Planning Approach for Multi-tenant Business Applications

The upcoming business model of providing software as a service (SaaS) bears a lot of challenges to service providers. On the one hand, service providers have to guarantee a certain quality of service (QoS) and ensure that they adhere to these guarantees at runtime. On the other hand, they have to minimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their IT landscape in order to offer competitive prices. Introducing multi-tenancy is a popular way for reducing TCO. But this concept also creates the risk of overload situations due to interfering tenants. Existing approaches for creating tenant allocations which minimize TCO for a given set of SLAs mainly focus on interactive dialog systems. However, besides such dialog interactions most business applications still involve background batch jobs, which might also interfere with each other. In this paper, we therefore propose a novel combined workload and batch planning approach for multi-tenant business applications offered as service.