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Multi-tenanted applications on Windows Azure and SQL Azure – added to my todo list for 2010

Note: Cross posted from IUpdateable from Eric Nelson.

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Back when I was an Application Architect working with UK ISVs I spent a lot of time helping companies understand how to architect multi-tenanted applications. However, I have never pondered about the challenges (and opportunities) of doing this with Windows Azure and SQL Azure. Until now.

What sparked it off was a fairly simple question from a UK ISV that I ended up copied on.

The question in essence was

“What is the recommended approach to building a multi-tenancy solution on Windows Azure and SQL Azure in relation to domains, IP addresses and https certificates for each customer”

I thought there would be a lot of public information on this – but after a 30 minute search I was surprised to find relatively little on this area. This is where I have got to so far:

It is worth mentioning that “Azure v1” was not designed to specifically support building multi-tenanted applications. Hence potentially there are easier ways to build multi-tenanted applications than by leveraging Windows Azure. Check out SaaSGrid for one such example. SaaSGrid lets you utilize Microsoft .NET languages to write code and provides a slim, simple yet very powerful API layer that allows the application to interact with SaaSGrid in certain explicit ways.

The final upshot of the above is… I have added this topic to my “things to understand in 2010” list :-)

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