Data Partitioning

The services and capabilities within our application plane often need to store data for tenants. Of course, how and where you choose to store that data can vary significantly based on the multi-tenant profile of your SaaS application. Any number of factors might influence your approach to storing data. The type of data, your compliance requirements, your usage patterns, the size of the data, the technology you’re using–these are all pieces of the multi-tenant storage puzzle.

In the world of multi-tenant storage, we refer to the design of these different storage models as data partitioning. The key idea here is that you are picking a storage strategy that partitions tenant data based on the multi-tenant profile of that data. This could mean the data is stored in some dedicated construct or it could mean it lands in some shared construct. These partitioning strategies are influenced by a wide range of variables. The storage technology you’re using (object, relational, nosql, etc.) obviously has a significant impact on the options you’ll have for representing and storing tenant data. The business and use cases of your application can also influence the strategy you select. The list of variables and options here are extensive.

As a SaaS architect, it will be your job to look at the range of different data that’s stored by your system and figure out which partitioning strategy best aligns with your needs. You’ll also want to consider how/if these strategies might impact the agility of your solution. How data impacts the deployment of new features, the up-time of your solution, and the complexity of your operational footprint are all factors that require careful consideration when selecting a data partitioning strategy. It’s also important to note that, when picking a strategy, this is often a fine-grained decision. How you partition data can vary across the different services within your application plane.

This is a much deeper topic that we’ll cover more extensively in Chapter 9. By the end of that chapter, you’ll have a much better sense of what it means to bring a range of different strategies to life using a variety of different storage technologies.