Building SaaS is just one part of the challenge. Operating a SaaS is another major challenge. We will need fleet-wide observability on what tenant-level activity is happening in the fleet including any operational issues, assistance with debugging active issues like metrics and logging, ability to hot patch tenants, rollout security fixes in <24 hours. In addition, we will need reliable monitoring, recovery mechanisms to common issues with full auditing of events on what happened. In case, things are not recoverable for any reason, we will need a reliable alerting mechanism so that you can stay ahead of your customers and address the issues quickly.

We will also need a layer to deal with capacity issues or other mundane tasks like rotating certificates. For account-level tenancy, we need a unified view across all the accounts and manage them effectively, draw out any patterns to provide the best experience and support to your customers. In addition, cost is a major issue and you will need to know the breakdown of where the cost is going from infra perspective, from tenant cost to pricing so that you can improve your pricing model, identify heavy hitters and address them to optimize the internal cost and business margins.

Developer productivity is another challenge with application, devops, support teams coming together. We will need core constructs like access controls, auditing etc. to secure the internal access. Another challenge that we have seen is how developers collaborate. We need developer environments that are easy to create, zero admin to maintain, seamlessly stay in sync with the production environment so that any testing done in these environments closely represents the production setup, proper CI/CD including production canaries to be able effectively operate any SaaS.

Finally, there are additional internal requirements from a compliance perspective, security perspective, scaling the SaaS components themselves, securing the SaaS metadata, adding controls to limit the blast radius for regulatory and BCP requirements. Building and maintaining them takes time and energy.

To learn more about all the core capabilities that we need to deliver a SaaS offering, see here
To learn more about how users can leverage a SaaS platform like Omnistrate to address many of these challenges, please see here.