SaaS
Software-as-a-Service delivery and multi-tenancy.
5 terms
SaaS-specific concerns start once you're building a product multiple customers share rather than infrastructure one team runs for itself. The central design decision is tenancy: single-tenant (each customer gets a dedicated stack — maximum isolation, higher cost per customer) versus multi-tenant (one application instance serves everyone — better unit economics, harder to keep customers' data and noisy-neighbor performance fully walled off).
This is the smallest category on the site by entry count, but the decisions it covers are architecture-defining ones that are expensive to reverse once customers are live on either model.
- Multi-Tenancy
A single software instance serves multiple customers with isolated data and configuration.
- Multi-tenant SaaS
The SaaS architecture where one application instance serves many customers with isolated data — economies of scale on one side, a single fat-fingered query from a breach on the other.
- SaaS Tenant Isolation
How a multi-tenant SaaS keeps each customer's data and activity walled off from every other customer's — the security foundation that determines trust, blast radius, and cost.
- Single-tenant SaaS
The SaaS model where each customer gets a dedicated, isolated stack — maximum isolation and per-customer flexibility, at the cost of the multi-tenant efficiencies that make SaaS cheap.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement)
A documented commitment to service availability, performance, or support response times.