Multi-tenancy allows multiple organizations to use a single application with their own configuration, on the same system. Despite the fact that many authors have done research on multi-tenancy, no clear definition exists.
In our survey, we research the current state of multi-tenancy. We identified four major software concepts that need extra care or provide extra opportunities in multi-tenant application development: security, as the security concerns are holding back adoption of multi-tenancy; scalability, as an unscalable application cannot leverage the benefits of the economics of scale; quality of service, as performance must be upheld for all active tenants; and variability, as that is where value is added for tenants. \
Our research agenda provides an overview of possible research opportunities, such as automation (automatic deployment, wizards for tenants), guarantees (solutions to new problems need to be provable) and tenant-aware components (such as load balancers and databases).
This paper was written for the BSc Computer Science third year's Bachelorseminarium course.