SAAS and Multi-tenancy in Symfony2? [closed]

I'm also using Symfony2 for similar amount of time (since one of BETAs) and I advise you to go with solution #1. If you are going SaaS you can't give out code to clients for the reasons you wrote (problems with updates / upgrades mainly). The whole hassle will be on the user management - which user has access to which data, belongs to which group, company and so on. All other things if done properly will be coded the same user-agnostic way. What should you do with different requirements for different companies? Make such features configurable. You can implement this on various levels:

• simple entity attributes: have an attributes field in each table and save everything as JSON, YAML or other dynamic-structurable content,
• general configuration: have one place where entity base configuration is stored (in the means I wrote above) and allow users to manage new features from there, all changes are propagated to simple entities,
• implement something what I call Entity Parameters Pattern - design database tables which would contain parameter types, parameter values and relation to other entities on different levels and then make generic configurable parameter types which can be applied to any place with predefined meaning. For example "preferred_season" being a parameter of type "choice_string" containing configuration "spring,summer,autumn,winter" and when attached to given entity would always render a <select> field with choices and save selected value with relation to both entity and parameter type.

Also the solution #1 has one unbeatable advantage - it could handle more that one company even if you wanted to give out the code at the end. You'd just need to mask the ability to add more. :)

This question is tagged Symfony2 but it really shouldn't. It doesn't matter what framework you're using, you should abstract your application design from code and then use frameworks as a mere tool for doing the job smoothly. I'd like to say that even taking previous sentence into account, I'm absolutely in love with Symfony2. :)

I know this is an older question but can be usefull for others.

I agree with @Tomasz and solution #1 with one database – all tenants in one database. The biggest problem here is proper database design to solve further security issues: access for resources must be controlled by application to prevent unauthorized access between tenants. On the other side we have ease implementation as we are implementing single application with only one database.

Nice article about Symfony2 and moving to SaaS model: http://www.browserlondon.com/blog/2015/01/moving-to-a-saas-model-with-symfony2/

Also "must read" article about designing database in SaaS platform - patterns that are platform independent: http://labs.octivi.com/database-design-in-saas-platforms/