Tag: SaaS Factory

Networking is often viewed as a foundational element of a system’s architecture. The reality is there are plenty of scenarios where the networking footprint of a SaaS application can influence the functionality, extensibility, and management profile of your SaaS environment. While there are plenty of creative ways developers leverage AWS networking constructs to refine SaaS solutions, the introduction of AWS PrivateLink adds new opportunities in the SaaS networking landscape.

Identity is a fundamental design decision that software as a service (SaaS) architects must consider when developing a multi-tenant system. Developers who are building SaaS applications must be able to identify a user, the tenant associated with the user, the user’s permissions, and the relationship a tenant has with the provider, such as usage plan or tier. In this post for SaaS Technology Partners, I will explore how to architect a multi-tenant system and identify tenant context and role using Amazon Cognito.

The SaaS Identity and Isolation with Amazon Cognito Quick Start equips developers with a full working solution that digs into the nuances of injecting tenant identity into SaaS applications. This Quick Start addresses a broad range of SaaS identity topics with specific emphasis on illustrating how tenant context is introduced via Amazon Cognito and used in combination with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to scope access to tenant resources.

SaaS solutions often present architects with a diverse mix of scaling and optimization requirements. With SaaS, your application’s architecture must accommodate a continually shifting landscape of customers and load profiles. The number of customers in the system and their usage patterns can change dramatically on a daily—or even hourly—basis. These dynamics make it challenging for SaaS architects to identify a model that can efficiently anticipate and respond to these variations.

In traditional single-tenant environments, calculating and aggregating infrastructure costs is a pretty straightforward exercise. Typically, each application or customer has its own collection of dedicated resources and tallying the costs is simply a matter of categorizing and summing those costs. However, in multi-tenant SaaS environments, this becomes a much more challenging problem. With SaaS, tenants often share some or all of a system’s infrastructure resources.

The move to a SaaS delivery model is often motivated by a fundamental need for greater agility and customer responsiveness. SaaS providers often succeed and thrive based on their ability to rapidly release new features without compromising the stability of their solutions. Achieving this level of agility starts with a commitment to building a robust DevOps pipeline that includes a rich collection of automated tests.