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Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

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Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#51

Post by thrownaway954 »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #19

In my experience, a lot of projects start off with shared tenancy (using a tenant id discriminator in the database) and eventually migrate to completely separate schema for each tenant (i.e. a separate “installation” of a single-tenancy app for each tenant) to avoid security and architectural pitfalls. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to worry about forgetting a `WHERE tenantId = foo` somewhere and leaking data.…

using an ORM it's very simple. once you setup the relationships between models, you always use the highest level model as the entry point of your query and the ORM will scope the query for you. ie in Rails, if your highest level model is Account you just always use @account.customer.find(18). the Rails ORM will automatically scope the query to the current account.

using multiple schemas becomes a nightmare when you want to perform a migration to alter the database schema. you have to somehow perform a migration across every single schema without breaking anything. god forbid you need to rollback. have everything in one database makes it really easy. as please, don't talk how using a single database restricts scaling later on. with how far databases have come and how cheap cloud computing is, scaling isn't an issue anymore.

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#52

Post by gitgud »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #19

In my experience, a lot of projects start off with shared tenancy (using a tenant id discriminator in the database) and eventually migrate to completely separate schema for each tenant (i.e. a separate “installation” of a single-tenancy app for each tenant) to avoid security and architectural pitfalls. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to worry about forgetting a `WHERE tenantId = foo` somewhere and leaking data.…

In my limited experience, companies start with single-tenancy apps. Get a client interested in their own private version, so they spin-up another instance.

Then they realise they've got a growing number of databases and webservers to maintain and account for, so they combine them all into a multi-tenant system.

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#53

Post by forgingahead »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #19

In my experience, a lot of projects start off with shared tenancy (using a tenant id discriminator in the database) and eventually migrate to completely separate schema for each tenant (i.e. a separate “installation” of a single-tenancy app for each tenant) to avoid security and architectural pitfalls. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to worry about forgetting a `WHERE tenantId = foo` somewhere and leaking data.…

Are separate schemas really the right way to handle this? The folks who wrote the Apartment gem for Rails, a multi-tenancy solution that works on separate schemas, wrote about some troubles when scaling:

https://influitive.io/our-multi-tenancy-journey-with-postgre...

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#54

Post by HatchedLake721 »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #51
ComputerGuru wrote: post #19

In my experience, a lot of projects start off with shared tenancy (using a tenant id discriminator in the database) and eventually migrate to completely separate schema for each tenant (i.e. a separate “installation” of a single-tenancy app for each tenant) to avoid security and architectural pitfalls. Once you’ve done that, you don’t have to worry about forgetting a `WHERE tenantId = foo` somewhere and leaking data.…

using an ORM it's very simple. once you setup the relationships between models, you always use the highest level model as the entry point of your query and the ORM will scope the query for you. ie in Rails, if your highest level model is Account you just always use @account.customer.find(18). the Rails ORM will automatically scope the query to the current account. using multiple schemas becomes a nightmare when you w…

The highest level entry point makes so much sense. I’ve been building multitenant saas for last 3 years enforcing “where tenant = x” and you’ve just blown my mind.

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#55

Post by petargyurov »

excid3 wrote: post #11

I've been working on something like this for Ruby on Rails in case anyone is interested. It has multitenancy, billing separate for each tenant, automatic query filtering for the current tenant, etc. https://jumpstartrails.com

Intereting. I've been thinking about doing something like this with Python (Flask/Django), albeit a bit more general.

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#56

Post by abhishektwr »

Will you consider a SaaS option? We are finishing up a identity management platform which does exactly that (at least access management part with 3-tiers of multi-tenancy). Our dedicated option allows you to host up to 1000-5000 tenants in a completely isolated infrastructure. Happy to have a chat.

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#58

Post by guptaneil »

One of the largest open-source Rails apps has all of those features: Canvas LMS[1]. It uses Switchman[2] for abstracting the multi-tenancy logic.

Their approach has scaled to millions of concurrent users, but admittedly not helpful if you’re looking for a guide since the code is buried in a legacy monolith.

Part of the reason there isn’t a generic guide to this is that multi-tenancy is probably a premature optimization if a generic guide would be helpful. Just use nested user accounts to accomplish your business logic. By the time you really need true multi-tenancy, generic sample code won’t be much more helpful than the docs of the various plugins like Switchman.

1: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms 2: https://github.com/instructure/switchman

Re: Ask HN: How come there is no example code for B2B-SaaS apps?

#59

Post by abhishektwr »

abhishektwr wrote: post #56

Will you consider a SaaS option? We are finishing up a identity management platform which does exactly that (at least access management part with 3-tiers of multi-tenancy). Our dedicated option allows you to host up to 1000-5000 tenants in a completely isolated infrastructure. Happy to have a chat.

Just to add details on this topic, Multi-tenancy is quite complicated subject and there are many ways to implement it.

(1) One database per tenant. Each tenant gets their own set of tables. Dedicated virtual infrastructure with strong data isolation. (2) One database but one schema per tenant using Postgres. Each tenant gets their own set of tables. Shared virtual infrastructure with strong data isolation. (3) One database one schema one set of tables but tenant data is segmented using tenant key in the tables. Shared virtual infrastructure logical data isolation. On top you can create tenant specific views.

Before you choose one, you need to analyse best possible approach according to your needs factoring performance, cost, maintenance and scalability. You can also mix some of these approaches in you solution. So for instance we use all 3 on top of single codebase.

Happy to respond any specific questions anyone may have.

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