Business efforts strive to respond to customer demands quickly, get products to market faster, increase overall profitability, and consistently outperform the competition. Agility, the ability to meet these common market challenges, is dependent on a solid business application technology platform. To achieve business agility, a multifaceted, intelligent software infrastructure is needed that is designed for application integration.
Business application platforms are typically single tenanted, meaning that they can host applications only for a single organization and all the platform resources are dedicated only to that organization. Such platforms are typically hosted by the customer and installed and deployed within their company premises. The cost for deploying and maintaining such platform may be high and the return-on-investment not optimized.
On the other hand, designing and managing multi-tenant systems has its own challenges. In a practical multi-tenant system, each client may have a different schema for connecting to their organization. Furthermore, each client may connect to multiple organizations rendering the management of such systems a very complex task from security, traffic management, reliability, and extensibility aspects.
This summary is provided to introduce a selection of concepts in a simplified form that are further described below in the Detailed Description. This summary is not intended to identify key features or essential features of the claimed subject matter, nor is it intended as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.
Embodiments are directed to providing an extensible, multi-tenant software-as-a-service model for serving multiple organizations from a single platform. A platform according to embodiments may include a discovery service for providing clients information associated with a location and configuration of the organization services hosted by the platform. The client is then enabled to access the organization services, which may be hosted in scalable clusters. Location changes may be provided to the client(s) for uninterrupted access of the client to the requested service(s).
These and other features and advantages will be apparent from a reading of the following detailed description and a review of the associated drawings. It is to be understood that both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description are explanatory only and are not restrictive of aspects as claimed.
As briefly described above, an extensible multi-tenant business application platform may be provided employing a discovery service and scalable server clusters. In the following detailed description, references are made to the accompanying drawings that form a part hereof, and in which are shown by way of illustrations specific embodiments or examples. These aspects may be combined, other aspects may be utilized, and structural changes may be made without departing from the spirit or scope of the present disclosure. The following detailed description is therefore not to be taken in a limiting sense, and the scope of the present invention is defined by the appended claims and their equivalents.
While the embodiments will be described in the general context of program modules that execute in conjunction with an application program that runs on an operating system on a personal computer, those skilled in the art will recognize that aspects may also be implemented in combination with other program modules.
Generally, program modules include routines, programs, components, data structures, and other types of structures that perform particular tasks or implement particular abstract data types. Moreover, those skilled in the art will appreciate that embodiments may be practiced with other computer system configurations, including hand-held devices, multiprocessor systems, microprocessor-based or programmable consumer electronics, minicomputers, mainframe computers, and the like. Embodiments may also be practiced in distributed computing environments where tasks are performed by remote processing devices that are linked through a communications network. In a distributed computing environment, program modules may be located in both local and remote memory storage devices.
Embodiments may be implemented as a computer process (method), a computing system, or as an article of manufacture, such as a computer program product or computer readable media. The computer program product may be a computer storage media readable by a computer system and encoding a computer program of instructions for executing a computer process. The computer program product may also be a propagated signal on a carrier readable by a computing system and encoding a computer program of instructions for executing a computer process.
Referring to
In such a typical single tenanted platform, client 102 accesses data and business applications associated with a single tenant that is hosted by web service 106 through networks 104. While networks 104 may be the Internet, it is commonly an intranet type combination of networks. Since a single tenant is hosted by the service, authentication, security, and other preliminary operations may be performed by the service itself, rather than using a third party service. The location of the services does typically not change, although redundancy and some load balancing operations may involve use of multiple servers and/or server clusters.
Thus, operations in a single-tenanted system are relatively simple and straight forward. However, in today's business world, many organizations prefer to outsource their business application platforms to entities that can provide efficient, cost-effective, and reliable service. In order to streamline their business model and efficiently utilize their resources, such entities may prefer to host services for multiple organizations. Furthermore, some clients may be associated with multiple organizations, in which case it would make sense for the client to access all organizations through a single contact point.
Web service 206 may perform management services and direct clients to organization specific web services 208. Additionally, web service 206 may perform authentication, security check, and similar preliminary services optionally using third party services. Organization specific web services 208 may include scalable clusters, where individual organizations' operations may be moved for load balancing and other reasons. Web service 206 may monitor such changes and redirect the calling client accordingly, such that the change is transparent to the client.
Clients may be thin or thick clients with additional services optionally provided by third party applications in the case of thin clients. Different clients may access different services using distinct schemas. Some of the services may also share the schemas.
The architecture in FIG. 2—for that matter also FIG. 1—is for illustrating an overview of software-as-a-service platforms. Only essential components are illustrated for simplicity purposes. In practice, such systems include many more components with specific tasks and communication methods. A more detailed discussion of such a platform according to embodiments is provided below.
According to some embodiments, the service may use an optional trusted third party authentication service for authenticating the users (client 302) of each organization (e.g. ticket service 312). Independent plug-in authentication services may also be used for Internet or intranet modes. According to other embodiments, access to each organization's data and operations may be restricted based on security roles and privileges and organization membership.
According to some implementations, each organization's data and applications may be isolated from the others and accessed through a set of dedicated of APIs. The APIs may enable developers to access and modify business data as well as define/invoke/modify business processes and logic remotely over the Internet. The APIs may be automatically generated and dynamic, so that whenever a new organization is added to or removed from the platform, the APIs can automatically adjust. The APIs may also be customizable allowing custom objects and operations to be added to each organization separate from other organizations.
Discovery service 322 provides authentication and organization discovery services enabling a client 302 to sign in into the platform 320 and discover all the organizations that he/she is a member of. Discovery service 322 may provide detailed configuration data about each organization including its location within the platform for direct access and other configuration information. The configuration information may be stored in and retrieved from configuration store 324. A user (client) can be a member of one or more organizations hosted in a site. The discovery service 322 may operate in multiple authentication modes. Each authentication mode may have its own dedicated endpoint enabling the client to specify what authentication should be used.
According to further embodiments, each API endpoint may serve multiple organizations. Each call to the API may identify the target organization intended to reach. The discovery service 322 may use configuration store 324 to retrieve organization configuration data. An administrator may be enabled to access and maintain the configuration store 324.
Organization data and operations may be placed in a plurality of scalable groups (service locations 1, 2, etc.) available within a service cluster 330 of the platform 320. An organization's location may change and move between the scalable groups for load balancing purposes. The extensible multi-tenant service model is dynamic in a sense that it can locate the target organization even after a move. Each service location (332, 334. . . ) may include one or more virtual or physical servers providing the services.
According to other embodiments, a locator service (not shown) may provide information about which database(s) may be used by the web servers. Web servers 433 may also place asynchronous service requests in queues to be handled by asynchronous servers 435 in conjunction with organization databases 433. As a client request comes up in the queue, one of the asynchronous servers 435 may be contacted for processing the request. A relationship between the asynchronous servers and the individual organization databases may be a distributed one, where each server may work with any one of the databases. This distributed interaction between the asynchronous servers and the organization databases may provide the ability to automatically recover from failures in the asynchronous processing machines by allowing the databases to connect to another available server when one fails.
Due to the independent distribution of synchronous and asynchronous work and the interaction between the servers and the databases, any part of the server cluster 430 is scalable. Thus, multiple instances of the servers (and/or databases) may be provided to address increased workload, additional organizations, data capacity, and so on.
According to the example operation, client 504 initiates a call by requesting a site policy from discovery service 506. Discovery service 506 responds with the site policy, which may identify an optional ticket service 502 (e.g. for authentication). If the optional third party ticket service 502 is used, client 504 may send a ticket request to the ticket service 502, and receive the service ticket if the client's credentials are confirmed for access to a requested organization (tenant).
Client 504 then submits a site ticket request with the service ticket from ticket service 502 to discovery service 506. Discovery service 506 responds with the site ticket. Client 504 may then submit a list of requested organizations, to which discovery service 506 responds with the list of locations of the requested organizations and other configuration information (schema, etc.). Subsequently, client 504 may access the target organizations through organization services 508 using the location and configuration information provided by the discovery service 506. As indicated previously, the location of organization services may change due to scaling, load balancing, and so on. Discovery service 506 may update the client with the changed location information such that the client's access to the organization service can continue seamlessly.
The scalable multi-tenant systems and operations described in
Such a system may comprise any topology of servers, clients, Internet service providers, and communication media. Also, the system may have a static or dynamic topology. The term “client” may refer to a client application or a client device. While a networked system implementing extensible multi-tenant services may involve many more components, relevant ones are discussed in conjunction with this figure.
Requests for access may come from tenants using individual client devices 602-606 or application server 608 in a networked multi-tenant system. Such a system may also be implemented, in one or more servers (e.g. servers 612, 614) and accessed by the client devices (or applications). One or more web servers (physical or virtual) such as web server 612 may receive the requests and direct them to the appropriate resource. The resources may include scalable server clusters with synchronous and asynchronous server, organization databases, and other components.
Organization databases may be embodied in a single data store such as data store 618 or distributed over a number of data stores. Dedicated database servers (e.g. database server 616) may be used to coordinate data retrieval and storage in one or more of such data stores.
Network(s) 610 may include a secure network such as an enterprise network, an unsecure network such as a wireless open network, or the Internet. Network(s) 610 provide communication between the nodes described herein. By way of example, and not limitation, network(s) 610 may include wired media such as a wired network or direct-wired connection, and wireless media such as acoustic, RF, infrared and other wireless media.
Many other configurations of computing devices, applications, data sources, data distribution systems may be employed to implement an extensible multi-tenant service platform. Furthermore, the networked environments discussed in
Web services 722 may be a separate application or an integral module of a hosted multi-tenant service platform that provides data and processing services to client applications associated with computing device 700. Discovery service 724 may provide location and configuration information associated with individual organization (tenant) services to a client requesting access to those. Optional locator service 726 may provide services associated with determining a purpose of the service and which databases to use for web servers, as well as asynchronous processing servers, as described previously. This basic configuration is illustrated in
The computing device 700 may have additional features or functionality. For example, the computing device 700 may also include additional data storage devices (removable and/or non-removable) such as, for example, magnetic disks, optical disks, or tape. Such additional storage is illustrated in
The computing device 700 may also contain communication connections 716 that allow the device to communicate with other computing devices 718, such as over a wireless network in a distributed computing environment, for example, an intranet or the Internet. Other computing devices 718 may include server(s) that execute applications associated with a location service or other services. Communication connection 716 is one example of communication media. Communication media may typically be embodied by computer readable instructions, data structures, program modules, or other data in a modulated data signal, such as a carrier wave or other transport mechanism, and includes any information delivery media. The term “modulated data signal” means a signal that has one or more of its characteristics set or changed in such a manner as to encode information in the signal. By way of example, and not limitation, communication media includes wired media such as a wired network or direct-wired connection, and wireless media such as acoustic, RF, infrared and other wireless media. The term computer readable media as used herein includes both storage media and communication media.
The claimed subject matter also includes methods. These methods can be implemented in any number of ways, including the structures described in this document. One such way is by machine operations, of devices of the type described in this document.
Another optional way is for one or more of the individual operations of the methods to be performed in conjunction with one or more human operators performing some. These human operators need not be collocated with each other, but each can be only with a machine that performs a portion of the program.
Process 800 begins with operation 802, where a request for accessing one or more organizations is received from a client along with the client credentials. As described previously, clients of a multi-tenant hosted service are typically associated with organizations or tenants each of which has a service including a dedicated database within the system. Prior to receiving the request, the client may optionally use a third party authentication service. Processing advances from operation 802 to decision operation 804.
At decision operation 804, a determination is made whether the client is authenticated. The determination may also include a check of whether the requested organization(s) are hosted by the multi-tenant service platform. If the client is authenticated, the process advances to operation 806. Otherwise, processing moves to a calling process for further actions.
At operation 806, a location of the requested organization service is determined. Processing moves from operation 806 to operation 808, where the location of the organization service is provided to the client for access. Additional configuration information may also be provided along with the location information. After operation 808, processing moves to decision operation 810.
At decision operation 810, a determination is made whether the location of the organization service is changed due to scaling, load balancing, and so on. If a change in the location is determined, processing moves to operation 812. Otherwise, processing moves to a calling process for further actions.
At operation 812, the change in the location of the organization service is provides to the client such that the client's access to the service can continue seamlessly. After operation 812, processing moves to a calling process for further actions.
The operations included in process 800 are for illustration purposes. Providing extensible multi-tenant service to a client may be implemented by similar processes with fewer or additional steps, as well as in different order of operations using the principles described herein.
The above specification, examples and data provide a complete description of the manufacture and use of the composition of the embodiments. Although the subject matter has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological acts, it is to be understood that the subject matter defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or acts described above. Rather, the specific features and acts described above are disclosed as example forms of implementing the claims and embodiments.
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