Challenges with Tenant-Specific Cost Determination in Multi-Tenant Applications
Anna Schwanengel, Uwe Hohenstein · 2015
Abstract — One key element to make Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) successful is so called multi-tenancy, which refers to an architecture model where one software instance serves a set of multiple clients of different organizations (tenants). Hence, it reduces the number of application instances and, in that way, operational costs in a Cloud. The problem SaaS providers are faced within everyday’s business is how to define a billing model that has the chance to make profit in a public Cloud. Being profitable with SaaS, the art is to bill tenants in such a way that covers the costs for resources for the underlying PaaS/IaaS provider. This paper discusses some challenges with metering the consumption of tenants as a prerequisite for defining a profitable billing model.