The move from a single-tenant monolithic architecture to a multi-tenant, modern architecture can be challenging for many organizations. The tight coupling and interwoven dependencies of a monolithic environment makes it especially difficult to move your system to microservices. Now, layer on that the goal of moving to a serverless model that supports multi-tenant SaaS and you now have a rather long list of technical, migration, and design challenges that will further complicate this transformation.

Given this complexity, many organizations will attempt to tackle this migration in a more evolutionary fashion where the elements of your system are incrementally transformed to a modern multi-tenant architecture without requiring some “big bang” moment where you completely rewrite your system. This approach also tends to fit better with the business priorities of organizations that are trying to find ways to continue to support existing customers while they gradually move their architecture over to this new model.

The goal of this lab is to guide you through a monolith to serverless SaaS migration that provides a more in-depth look at the common moving parts of this problem. Certainly, each solution will have its own unique collection of migration challenges. However, seeing a working example can provide you with insights into patterns and strategies that can help shape your approach to moving your monolithic environment to a multi-tenant SaaS model.

In this Lab, we'll start with a traditional monolithic architecture for a working sample application. Then, we'll progressively migrate the elements of the single-tenant monolithic architecture to a modern multi-tenant solution. This will include moving to a modern web application hosted on S3, introducing the API Gateway, decomposing the application tier into serverless microservices, and carving data out of our monolithic database and moving management of this data to the individual microservices that take over ownership of managing this data. Along the way, we'll also introduce the elements needed to introduce multi-tenant best practices into your solution.

If you are participating in this workshop during an AWS event, follow the instructions of the instructors on site.

If you would like to run through the lab exercises in a self-guided manner, follow the steps below:

1. Use an existing S3 bucket, or create a new S3 bucket in the same AWS Region where you’re going to run the workshop.
2. Copy the 2 CloudFormation custom resources and the main workshop template to your S3 bucket.

aws s3 cp s3://aws-saas-factory-serverless-saas-workshop-us-west-2/CopyS3Objects.jar ./ && aws s3 cp CopyS3Objects.jar s3://my-saas-workshop-bucket/ 
aws s3 cp s3://aws-saas-factory-serverless-saas-workshop-us-west-2/ClearS3Bucket.jar ./ && aws s3 cp ClearS3Bucket.jar s3://my-saas-workshop-bucket/ 
aws s3 cp s3://aws-saas-factory-serverless-saas-workshop-us-west-2/workshop.template ./ && aws s3 cp workshop.template s3://my-saas-workshop-bucket/

3. Launch the workshop’s CloudFormation stack and give it your S3 bucket name as the value for the EEAssetsBucket parameter. Leave all other parameters default.

aws cloudformation create-stack --capabilities CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM --stack-name saas-workshop --template-url https://my-saas-workshop-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/workshop.template --parameters ParameterKey=EEAssetsBucket,ParameterValue=my-saas-workshop-bucket

Replace my-saas-workshop-bucket with your settings. The stack will probably take around 20+ minutes to complete due to the RDS clusters.

Note that this workshop deploys infrastructure into your AWS account that is outside of the free tier, and you should delete the CloudFormation stack when you are finished to minimize costs.

Proceed to Lab 1 when you are ready to begin.

This workshop is licensed under the MIT-0 License. See the LICENSE file.