Multi-tenant Web/SaaS application

Question

I'd like to ask for general advice on developing a multi-tenant application to be used over the web.

The application I have in mind has the following properties/requirements:

• Possibly as many as 1000 individual organisations. Data is private so should never be available (purposely or otherwise) between organisations.
• As many as 100,000 data records for each individual organisation
• At least 2-3 users actively engaging with the system from each organisation on a daily basis
• Preference is for each organisation to use the same application base with customisations

I'd like to know which sorts of development environments/frameworks would be suited to this task? I've read a lot of stuff regarding technologies such as Scala/Lift but I haven't been able to find anything to suggest if these sorts of things are appropriate for this use. Does this sort of application require multiple databases and/or multiple application instances to run effectively?

Answer 1

Its been a long time since you have posted this question, but I happen to take a look at it now.

Here is what you can use. You can use Microsoft .Net Framework 4.0 or higher, ASP.NET MVC 2.0 or higher, with ASP.Net MVC4.0, you have REST features enabled out of the box. For database, you can use MySQL, Oracle or SQL Server from Microsoft. These are the technologies that are widely supported by Amazon, Azure etc... Also Ruby is also used for the development. I have worked with Microsoft .Net and found it pretty comfortable as it supports separation of concerns out of the box via ASP.Net MVC and also Enterprise library can be effectively used to handle the cross cutting concerns. There are a lot of technical papers [Research Scholars] also speaks about the use of .Net for a SaaS Application development.