SaaS applications need to be highly available, with several 9’s of SLA. We have to deal with all sorts of failures, ranging from hardware failures, software failures, hung processes, data center power outages, networking switch failures, degraded storage, to correlated failures, and so on. You will have to keep track of per-tenant SLAs not only to monitor their health and take proactive actions before their availability falls below their SLA, but also to take necessary actions to remediate common issues.

SaaS provisioning requires tenant account creation, user provisioning, figuring out the tenant placement, configuring the tenant, and storing all the metadata. We also need to set up all the infrastructure, deploy software, configure software based on user input, enable monitoring, set up certificates, secure end-to-end access, safely coordinate everything during failures, and notify users of the provisioning progress.

A SaaS application serves several tenants, and each tenant should be isolated from one another. Depending on where and how you want to deploy, you may choose one or more types of isolation for your application.

Building SaaS is hard, costly and time-consuming. I have discussed the challenges in building and operating your SaaS. To learn more, please see here.

A typical startup journey looks like this: you have an idea, you validate the market, you build your initial MVP, you raise some capital. After raising the initial capital or in some cases just before, you are looking to monetize by finding a product-market fit.

Now, you can spend the next few years and use the capital on building your SaaS control plane, or you can focus on your application to build core differentiation or competitive moat and find the product-market fit to generate revenue. Doing one of them is extremely hard, trying to do both will also add significant risk to the success of your business and long-term success.

Kubernetes (K8s) Operators serve as effective tools for automating certain aspects of the control plane. In fact, if you already possess an operator and are considering building your end-to-end SaaS solution, please refer to this page.

However, it's important to recognize that having a K8s operator represents a first step towards building SaaS:

We think that Terraform is an excellent IaC tool if you want to setup your cloud infrastructure. It provides you a programmatic way to build infrastructure that can be replicated across regions. However, when it comes to SaaS, we feel that it falls short on many grounds:

Time and time again, we observe organizations grappling with the right design, consequently entangled in perpetual operations. Initially, with 5 or 10 customers, everything seems promising, but as you scale, the cracks start to appear from every direction.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of Software as a Service (SaaS), navigating the path to success requires foresight, strategic planning, and an acute awareness of common pitfalls. Embarking on the journey of Software as a Service (SaaS) requires careful planning to avoid common mistakes. It's not just about setting up billing and provisioning systems.

Developing software as a service (SaaS) in today's cloud environment can be compared to creating an application for an operating system (OS). Just as developers don't concern themselves with the intricacies of CPU scheduling or memory management when writing applications for Windows or Linux, similar abstractions are needed in the cloud.

Innovation is the heartbeat of the technology industry, a relentless pursuit to deliver greater value and meet evolving customer needs.

In information technology, hardware innovations paved the way, providing the computational power needed for software development. However, the coupling of hardware and software limited customization, time to distribute, cost of delivery, and customer experience. With the introduction of the Operating System (OS), software became independent of hardware. This not only tackled distribution challenges but also fueled innovation in the software industry, giving rise to various applications like Oracle databases, the Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe Photoshop, and SAP ERP.