Regarless of the problem your App solves, all SaaS Applications need the same foundations, however, before we begin defining each one of those compontents, we need to understand the different SaaS Models
SaaS Models
Pool
This is the most common start for SaaS applications, basically it’s a single application and we filter database tables by particular users. This model is the most cost effective infrastructure to maintain.
This model is not great for enterprises that depend on your Application
- One tenant will impact the performance of other tenants, this is commonly called Noisy Neighbor
- Not many layers of security, as a single query bug can breach tenant privacy
- Can NOT serve infinite number tenants, at some point alternative SaaS models will be required to continue to support customer growth
Bridge
This is basically a build-your-own model where operators try to separate as much as possible but considering cost factors. There is a natural transition from Pool to Bridge where the database compute is shared and we rely on database virtual isolation, like creating DB instances or schemas per tenant
This model will impact your team delivery performance as there are many missing supporting tools, basically the whole control plane is missing
Siloed
This is literally the oposite of Pool, incrediable secure and stable, however, this comes at less effective use of the underline resources, the beauty is that usually customers requiring this Service Level Agreements (SLA) are happy to pay a premium
In order for this model to support growth, an advance delivery pipeline and mature control plane are mandatory
SaaS Components
The main requirement of a success full SaaS App is to support multi-tentancy
These are foundational compoments required to support it, keep in mind that this is external to where your customers get their work done today.
- Manage users/tokens and Role Base Access Control
- Subscribe to products and manage their bills
- Monitoring their usage
- Provision and Decomision Infrastrute
User Management
This is where your customer register for the first time, this is integral to integrating to 3er parties like payment provider and identity provider, we will need a attach a tenant-id and initiate provisioning of configuration so that they can initiate a trial period on a pooled instance
Payments
Let’s be honest, the point of a business is to increase revenue, your SaaS needs to support subscription, the nice part about this is that you don’t have build your own payment gateway, you just need a lightweigth integration to a payment provider like Stripe, they also offer basic self user management for historical bills and product subscriptions 🎉
Monitoring
Today monitoring role has been on supporting troubleshooting tricky bugs, however, in a SaaS application monitoring is a critical business requirements, we need this data to charge each tenant accordintly, moreover, tenants need to visualize their consumption patterns. This new capability will provide your business team with a direct correlation between features, usage and revenue
Standing on the shoulders of giants
Everytime a question is asked to Google, there are a least a thousand people that asked that same question, same goes for your SaaS journey. AWS has several whitepapers dedicated at creating SaaS Applications, fill with details from business strategy to leasons learned from other companies like yours
The common reaction to this coversation is:
“There is a lot understand on those whitepapers, following your own advice:
is learning all those whitepapers essential to solve your customer’s problems?”
Bingo!
No, that’s why you should partner with us. You are our target customer and we focus on providing Production ready Cloud Infrastructure for SaaS Applications on AWS so that you can focus on solving your customers’s problems
Apply to Partner with us today
We are committed to your success, your SaaS Applications have the potential to disrupt the market and we want to be part of the story