Excess Materials Exchange’s multi-tenant SaaS platform
Excess Materials Exchange is a B2B digital marketplace, where companies buy and sell any type of excess materials, products, and waste streams across sectors. The marketplace solution acts as a dating site for secondary materials by providing streams with an:
- Identity
- Intelligence
- Integral approach
To achieve a full-scale circular economy, multiple suppliers, buyers, and value-added providers need to be able to easily cooperate on the EME platform. We have therefore developed a multi-tenant solution (a platform that hosts multiple companies) for the EME platform, which is offered as Software as a Service (SaaS). Our multi-tenancy setup provides every tenant a dedicated instance (the customised platform version) and helps maintain the modularity and security aspects of the platform in a structurally organised manner. In this article, we explain the need for and the technical aspects of the multi-tenancy setup on the EME platform.
Multi-tenant SaaS database design patterns of EME platform
Multi-tenant systems are designed to provide every tenant (company) a dedicated share of the instance (one common platform). In a sense, it’s a bit like an apartment building: you don’t need to build a new building for each new tenant, but rather house many tenants in a single building, aided by common infrastructure like hallways and shared plumbing. The multi-tenant set-up enables us to host multiple tenants (companies) to perform transactions on the EME platform.
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Benefits of a multi-tenant setup at EME
- Easy onboarding — Adding new customers to the EME platform is easier as tenants (companies) are isolated with their own database services, a change in adding a new tenant (company) does not impact the entire set up, hence simpler to onboard.
- Efficiency — The platform consists of common services, like resources passports, the payment system, reports, and the marketplace service. These services will be used by all customers. Our set-up makes the reuse of these common services for individual clients within their individual environments possible and hence the efficiency of the platform for the customer increases.
- Streamlined Maintenance — Maintenance costs are rolled into the price of the EME platform subscription, which saves users from investing in costly on-site technicians and updates. Regular updates and new releases are available to all customers, leading to improved uptime and operational capacity.
- Cost Savings — Since multi-tenant architecture enables the exchange of services, databases, resources, and applications, it costs less than a single-tenant structure. Scaling has fewer implications because new users can access the same software as the original buyers. Additionally, maintenance and upgrade costs are usually built into the SaaS subscription fee, so there are no surprise charges.
- Scalability & Larger Computing Capacity — Multi-tenant SaaS solutions are designed to service all sizes of business, both large and small. If your computing needs change, the software is easily scalable and elastic to changing demands.
Our selected approach
We have considered the below design pattern options for the EME platform. Selecting the right multi-tenant architecture pattern is a trade-off between multiple factors such as:
- Tenant isolation
- Resource sharing
- Elasticity (scaling up the platform with new tenants)
We have selected the multi-tenant application with database-per-tenant on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
This pattern uses a multi-tenant application with many databases, all being single-tenant databases. A new database is provisioned for each new tenant.
This multi-tenancy solution simplifies the release management process at EME. With the multi-tenant model, the code packages are typically only installed on a single server per environment of the EME platform. This greatly simplifies the deployment process for us and scaling the platform, i.e. adding a new tenant (customer) does not create deployment overheads.
EME platform’s multi-tenancy data architecture overview
In the multi-tenant architecture on the EME platform, each tenant is assigned a separate database, created as clones of the core structure, however, the databases are customized independently of one another as per the clients’ specific requirements. Entire maintenance operations are done independently of other tenants, which allows for maximum isolation, security, efficiency, and scalability, for the cost of individual maintenance.
The data workflow and transactions traffic flow is shown in the below diagram:
If you’re interested in learning more about the Excess Materials Exchange platform, follow us, check out our company website, or reach out to us at info@excessmaterialsexchange.com.
