Embodiments of the present invention provide a method and system for managing life-cycles of a “software as a service” (SaaS) software application. In one embodiment, a method comprises installing the SaaS software application in a system landscape on a computer server, the system landscape containing at least an application server and a database (DB) server; separating system data from customer data and storing them in different databases; creating a virtual machine (VM) image for the system landscape, the VM image to include the databases containing system data and exclude the databases containing customer data; deploying the SaaS software application to one or more computer servers by loading VMs based on the VM image; when the SaaS software application need to be upgraded to a new version, preparing a new VM image with the new version of the SaaS software application and using the new VM image.