Billing

Most SaaS systems have some dependency on a billing system. This could be a home grown billing system or it could be any one of the commercial SaaS billing systems that are available from different billing providers. Regardless of the approach, you can see how billing is a core concept that has a natural home within the control plane.

Billing has a couple touch points within the control plane. It’s typically connected to the onboarding experience where each new tenant must be created as a “customer” within your billing system. This might include configuring the tenant’s billing plan and setting up other attributes of the tenant’s billing profile.

Many SaaS solutions have billing strategies that meter and measure tenant activity as part of generating a bill. This could be bandwidth consumption, number of requests, storage consumption, or any other activity-related events that are associated with a given tenant. In these models, the control plane and your billing system must provide a way for this activity data to be ingested, processed, and submitted to your billing system. This could be a direct integration with the billing system or you could introduce your own services that process this data and send it to the billing system.

We’ll get more into the details of billing integration in Chapter 16. The key here is to realize that billing will likely be part of your control plane services and that you’ll likely be introducing dedicated services to orchestrate this integration.

Tenant Management

Every tenant in our SaaS system needs to be centrally managed and configured. In our control plane, this is represented by our Tenant Management service. Typically, this is a pretty basic service that provides all the operations needed to create and manage the state of tenants. This includes tracking key attributes that associate tenants with a unique identifier, billing plans, security policies, identity configuration, and an active/inactive status.

In some cases, teams may overlook this service or combine it with other concepts (identity, for example). It’s important for multi-tenant environments to have a centralized service that manages all of this tenant state. This provides a single point of tenant configuration and allows tenants to easily manage them through a single experience.

We’ll explore the elements and permutations of implementing tenant management more in Chapter 5.