OPS 4: How do you support the need for tenant-specific customizations?

SaaS businesses rely on the operational efficiency of managing and operating all customers through a single pane of glass. To maintain their agility and efficiency, SaaS organizations will introduce all customization through a universal mechanism that is available to all tenants, eliminating the need to deploy and manage separate environments or versions for each tenant.

Resources

Feature Toggles (aka Feature Flags)

Best Practices:

• Use feature flags to manage tenant variations: Support feature and functional variations through the introduction of flags that are enabled and disabled on a tenant-by-tenant basis.

• Support unique tenant requirements via shared application customizations: Address any need for variation through the introduction of generalized application customization constructs that are configured as part of the tenant configuration process.

Improvement Plan

Use feature flags to manage tenant variations

Introduce feature flags into your application design, enabling separate paths of execution that can be enabled for different tenants.
Feature Toggles (aka Feature Flags)

Provide a centralized mechanism for associating feature flags with tenants, allowing features to be enabled and disabled by a single process.

• Store feature flags as part of your tenant management function (using Amazon DynamoDB) and propagate these flags to your identity provider where they are stored as custom claims.
• Use the feature flags embedded in the tokens supplied to your application services, allowing services to access and apply feature flags without incurring the overhead associated with calling another service to acquire flags.

Support unique tenant requirements via shared application customizations

Introduce all tenant customizations as an extension of your core application, enabling customization to be offered to all tenants—even if they are only required for a single tenant.

Support one deployment for all tenants, relying on build on the configuration, build, and deployment process to apply any customization options may be needed for any one tenant.

Create a centralized construct that is used to manage tenant customizations.

Where there’s a correlation between customization and subscriptions or plans that a tenant can purchase, the purchase of these options applies the customizations that are associated with a given plan.