Agility is essential to most SaaS organizations. The move to SaaS is often driven a fundamental need to react to the customers and market dynamics at a much faster pace. In this chalk talk, we’ll explore the common strategies and architectural patterns that are leveraged by SaaS providers to realize these agility goals. The goal here to look more closely at how multi-tenancy shapes your approach to service decomposition, deployment automation (CI/CD), SLAs, analytics, and management of your SaaS application. How can you ensure zero downtime of your solutions? How do you build policies to proactively detect load and performance issues? How do you introduce tenant context into your operational experience? These are amongst the list of challenges that we’ll review as we consider the tooling and mechanisms you can apply to maximize the agility of your SaaS environment.

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SaaS Operations: The Foundation
of SaaS Agility
Judah Bernstein
Partner Solutions Architect
AWS Partner Program
A R C 2 1 6

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SaaS operations: A higher DevOps bar
Zero downtime
Speed
Scale
Rapid delivery
Collaboration
Security
SaaS OPS

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The importance of agility in SaaS
Frictionless
on-boarding
Rapid
market
response
Frequent
feature
releases
Instant
customer
feedback
SaaS demands an agile architecture
to meet its business model
Ownership
and shared
responsibility
Tiering
and
support levels
Decomposing Automating Decoupling
Simplifying Evolving Re-using
Techniques to achieve
SaaS agility

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The challenges of an operationally excellent SaaS
DeploymentIntegration
Orchestration
Integration across a number of
domain-specific services often
forked based on customer
specific requirements.
Zero downtime cross-region
deployment expectations across
siloed, pooled, and bridge
infrastructure.
Low-friction and frustration-free
infrastructure provisioning across
single and multi-tenant pods.
Testing
Testing isolation boundaries and
tenant-specific requirements
while mitigating service-wide
disruptions.
Service tiering
Value adding service level and
functional tiering all while ensuring a
consistent performance and
availability.
Management
Scalable management of customer
workloads across a variety of
compute, storage, and network
solutions.

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Zero downtime strategiesBusiness impact
Lost
opportunities
Reduced
productivity
Eroded trust SLA penalties
Damaged
reputation
SEO rank
degradation
“How do you react to an unplanned outage?” “Don’t ”
Achieving zero downtime
Downtime
cost calculator
Canary
deployment
A/B testingOnline
schema change
Blue/Green
deployment
Shadow
deployment

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MicroServices simplifies the DevOps experience
OwnershipLess risk
Simplicity
A larger number of services
decoupled from one another
reduces the risk of one causing a
catastrophic failure.
Decomposing into smaller units
allows for distinct ownership of a
product and feature providing
distinct boundaries for
responsibility.
Decoupling services provides the
ability to maintain components
individually and swap things with
ease.
Flexibility
Segmenting services by
corresponding domain allows for
flexible configuration for the
integration, build, test, and
deployment requirements.
Focus
Microservices allows ops teams to
focus more on performance, scale,
and delivering an optimal experience
for multiple customers and add
business value.
Agility
Segmenting components allows for
a rapid pace of software delivery
allowing businesses to get things to
market quickly.

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How would you design a pipeline for this architecture?
Amazon API
Gateway*
Amazon
Cognito
AWS Lambda
authorizer
Tenant 1 Tenant 2
Log in
AZ A
Application
Load
Balancer
Amazon
EKS
AZ A
Amazon
EKS
Amazon
DynamoDB
Amazon
Aurora
PostGres
Aurora
PostGres
M
S
Amazon
S3 BucketAmazon
Kinesis Data
Streams

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An agile SaaS solution delivery strategy
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)Continuous Delivery (CD)
Configuration
management
Configuration
orchestration
Continuous
integration
Continuous
deployment

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Monitoring and logging a multi-tenant app
Tenant activity
LoggingMonitoring
Unified view
Tenant activityPod sanity
Tech + Bus KPI Tier performance
Isolation eventsCustom attributes

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Learn more and next steps
• Learn more about SaaS on AWS
• https://aws.amazon.com/partners/saas-on-aws/#why
• Explore AWS SaaS factory content
• https://aws.amazon.com/partners/saas-factory/
• Sign up for the AWS SaaS interest list
• http://go.awspartner.com/saas

12. Thank you!
© 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Judah Bernstein
judahb@amazon.com

13. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.