Defining Composite Configurable SaaS Application Packages Using SCA, Variability Descriptors and Multi-tenancy Patterns

Currently, several vendors and projects are building proprietary SaaS platforms where more and more applications are hosted in a Software as a Service business model. However, these proprietary platforms prevent that applications offered by different SaaS application vendors can be easily reused on the platforms offered by the different SaaS hosting providers. In this paper we describe a package format for composite configurable SaaS application packages for applications developed following a service oriented architecture. We show how the service component architecture (SCA) can be extended with variability descriptors and SaaS multi-tenancy patterns to package and deploy multi- tenant aware configurable composite SaaS applications.