How are SaaS applications organized?

Question

Consider a web application (MVC, such as Rails) for several clients as a service.

How to do it?

• one instance of the application per client? (+ one database for each client)

• one instance for all clients (+ one database for all clients)

The former one is simple, but ... "inefficient." How about the last one? (best practices, design patterns) How to separate customer data? For example: worker "A" of client "1" has two documents, worker "B" of client "2" has three documents. How to create model associations to protect the data of other users (and customers)? I think that combining each request with a client model is not a good solution.

Answer 1

I would suggest looking at an earlier answer to multi-tenant applications in Ruby on Rails .

It really depends on your use case, but the easiest way to deal with this is to have a single database with the scope of specific applications. You can go from there depending on your requirements / budget.

I am a big fan of the postgresql system described in detail in this link: P

Answer 2

This MSDN article explains well the multi-tenant architecture.

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