Tag: SaaS on AWS

SaaS transformations are full of unknowns for those who navigate these issues for the first time. The AWS SaaS Factory team has observed many organizations transforming to a SaaS delivery model, and we have witnessed many that succeeded and some who haven’t. Explore five common challenges faced in the Business Planning phase of the SaaS Journey Framework, and dive deep on SaaS transformation pitfalls that are hindering companies’ success.

Capturing, managing, and analyzing costs is an essential part of any SaaS business. Without a firm grasp on the cost profile of your SaaS environment, it will be difficult to assess the tiering and pricing models of your solution. Learn how the Cost Optimization pillar of the AWS Well-Architected SaaS Lens identifies specific best practices that can help you improve the cost profile of a SaaS application. These play a key role in shaping the operational and scaling experience of your SaaS environment.

Fintech startup Personetics offers data-driven personalization for financial services. By using artificial intelligence-powered technology to analyze financial data, Personetics examines individuals’ financial behaviors in real-time, anticipating their needs and acting on their behalf. The company recently conducted an AWS Well-Architected Review as it extended their product offering from an on-premises model to include a SaaS delivery model as well.

The reliability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected SaaS Lens focuses on the reliability posture of your SaaS solution. The SaaS Lens helps AWS customers assess the overall reliability of their SaaS architecture, providing prescriptive guidance that enables better alignment of their architecture. There are several considerations to keep in mind when building or optimizing a SaaS solution for reliability. While some apply to all modern solutions, others are specific to SaaS and that’s the focus of this post.

Organizations are rapidly adopting SaaS solutions to better serve their end customers using specialized software, but using SaaS services can lock key business data in different “data islands” that are hard to integrate. AWS recently announced the extension of support for Zendesk as both source and destination in Amazon AppFlow. This expanded integration enables customers to transfer data bi-directionally between Zendesk and other AWS and SaaS services in just a few clicks.

When moving to a SaaS model, companies need more flexible billing constructs that allow them to support a range of billing strategies and models. Learn how SaaS providers can create a billing integration experience that captures metering data and publishes it to a third-party billing system. We’ll also review common SaaS billing models and introduce a sample billing implementation that provides a working example of how you can approach building a strategy for integrating with SaaS billing providers.

As more organizations make the move to a SaaS delivery model, many are choosing Amazon EKS as the target for their solutions. The programming model, cost efficiency, security, deployment, and operational attributes of Amazon EKS represent a compelling model for SaaS providers. Walk through the key architectural elements of a sample architecture, and learn how to isolate tenants within an EKS cluster, automate tenant onboarding, manage tenant identities, and support routing of tenant workloads.

With Amazon Keyspaces, AWS has enabled SaaS providers to run their Apache Cassandra workloads using a fully managed, serverless offering. This option allows you to leverage the strengths of Cassandra while getting all of the scale, cost, reliability, and operational efficiency that comes with a managed model. Learn how Amazon Keyspaces can be used to store data in a multi-tenant architecture and review common models for partitioning each tenant’s data.

Many SaaS applications boast of microservices as a means to divide a monolithic architecture into easily manageable solutions. Sometimes these microservices have their own databases. To maintain data consistency across the system, you need to implement a data synchronization system between source and target data persistence layers. Learn how Trantor has developed a solution using Amazon AppFlow to easily synchronize the data between Salesforce and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL in near real-time.

As a SaaS provider, it’s essential to have a clear picture of how tenants are exercising your system. Being able to model the functional and operational profile of tenants and tenant tiers is critical to evolving the business and technical strategies of a SaaS organization. Learn about the role metrics play within a SaaS-based application, and dive deep into a solution that provides all of the infrastructure that will support the ingestion, aggregation, and analysis of SaaS metric data.