3 Signs Your Resource Allocation Model Is Working Against You
After 6 posts on SaaS Tenancy Models, I want to bring it back to some concrete examples. When your SaaS has a Single Tenant model, clients expect to allocate all the resources they need, whenever they want. When every client is entitled to the entire resource pool, no client gets a great customer experience.
Here are 3 signs your Resource Allocation Model is working against you:
- Large clients cause small client’s work to stall
- You have to rebalance the mix of clients in a cell for stability
- Run your job at night for best performance
Large clients cause small client’s work to stall
This is a classic “noisy neighbor” problem. Each client tries to claim all the shared resources needed to do their work. This isn’t much of a problem when none of the clients need a significant percentage of the pool. When a large client comes along, it drains the pool, and leaves your small clients flopping like fish out of water.
You have to rebalance the mix of clients in a cell for stability
When having multiple large clients in a cell affects stability, the short term solution is to migrate some clients to another cell. Large clients can impact performance, but they should not be able to impact stability. Moving clients around buys you time, but it also forces you to focus on smaller, less profitable clients.
Run your job at night for best performance
This is advice that often pops up on SaaS message boards. Don’t try to run your job during the day, schedule it to run in the evening so it is ready for the morning. When clients start posting workarounds to your problems, it’s a clear sign of frustration. Your clients are noticing that performance varies by the time of day. They are building mental models of your platform and deciding you have load and scale issues. By being helpful to each other, your clients are advertising your problems.
Conclusion
These 3 issues have the same root cause; your SaaS’s operational data is mixed in with client data. If you have any of these three problems, the time has come to separate your data from the clients’.
Fixing these problems won’t be easy or quick!
The good news is that you can separate the data and change your resource allocation model in an iterative fashion. Start by pushing your job service across the tenancy line.
Get value and regain control one incremental step at a time, and never do a rewrite!
