There is no well-defined pattern or framework for building a managed SaaS. Building a well-managed SaaS involves solving a wide variety of problems. Some of these problems are common across different kinds of SaaS, and some are very specific to the SaaS. Examples of common problems are billing, analytics, metrics, and onboarding. Examples of problems that are different for every SaaS are provisioning (what resources should be provisioned when a new tenant onboards), data isolation, scaling, and performance needs. For the sake of this article, we will classify common problems as control plane problems, and different problems as data plane problems.
This article briefly talks about the different models of providing tenant isolation and then delves into the security considerations of building a SaaS.