Designing SaaS Solutions

The market for Software as a Service has been growing with massive numbers over the past five years. It’s expected that the market for SaaS will grow to over 600 billion US-dollars during this year (2023).

SaaS as a strategy makes sense if a company wants to expand its business fast. SaaS products allow customers access to applications over the internet, without the need to buy a physical product that they need to install themselves on a device. SaaS products are centrally hosted on cloud platforms, where the product is fully managed by the developers. The customer is assured of the newest releases because of the central hosting and management model.

SaaS is extremely customer-centric: the customer simply subscribes to the service, gets access and next, the service is ready to use on the device of the customer’s choice. Hence, developing SaaS products has become sort of the holy grail to many enterprises.

The major cloud providers offer toolkits...

Performance KPIs in a public cloud – what's in it for you?

As we mentioned in the previous section, performance is a tricky subject and, to put it a bit more strongly, if there's one item that will cause debates in service-level agreements, it's going to be performance. In terms of KPIs, we need to be absolutely clear about what performance is, in terms of measurable objectives.

What defines performance? It's the user experience. What about how fast an application responds and processes a request? Note that fast is not a measurable unit. A lot of us can probably relate to this: a middle-aged person may think that an app on their phone responding within 10 seconds is fast, while someone younger may be impatiently tapping their phone a second after they've clicked on something. They have a relative perception of fast. Thus, we need to define and agree on what is measurably fast. One thing to keep in mind is that without availability, there's nothing...

Optimizing your multi-cloud environment

Cloud providers offer advisor tools we can use to optimize environments that are hosted on their platforms. In this section, we will briefly look at these different tools and how we can use them.

Using Trusted Advisor for optimization in AWS

It all honesty, getting the best out of AWS – or any other cloud platform – is really not that easy. There's a good reason why these providers have an extensive training and certification program. The possibilities are almost endless, and the portfolios for these cloud providers grow bigger every day. We could use some guidance while configuring our environments. AWS provides that guidance with Trusted Advisor. This tool scans your deployments, references them against best practices within AWS, and returns recommendations. It does this for cost optimization, security, performance, fault tolerance, and service limits.

Before we go into a bit more detail, there's one requirement we must...

Use case: creating solutions for business continuity and disaster recovery

Now that we have gathered the business requirements, identified the risks and considered our application strategy including the usage of PaaS and SaaS, we can start thinking about solutions and align these with the requirements. The best way to do this is to create a matrix with the systems, the requirements for resilience, and the chosen technology to get the required resilience. The following table shows a very simple example of this, with purely fictional numbers:

Resilient systems are designed in such a way that they can withstand disruptions. Regardless of how well the systems might be designed and configured, sooner or later, they will be confronted with failures and, possibly, disruptions. Resilience is therefore often associated with quality attributes such as redundancy and availability.

Creating backups in the Azure cloud with Azure Backup and Site Recovery

Azure Backup works with the principle of...

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the definitions of resilience and performance. Companies want their applications to be available and to perform well: it defines the customer experience. We discussed various concepts that developers can use to build performant and resilient applications, using cloud native tools as much as possible in Twelve Factor, PaaS and SaaS.

We also learned how to optimize our environments using different advisory tools that cloud providers offer. We then learned how to identify risks in the various layers: business, data, applications, and technology. We studied the various methods we can use to mitigate these risks.

One of the biggest risks is that we "lose" systems without the ability to retrieve data from backups or without the possibility to failover to other systems. For real business-critical systems, we might want to have disaster recovery, but at a minimum, we need to have proper backup solutions in place. Various backup and disaster recovery...

Questions

1. What do the terms RPO and RTO stand for?
2. What tool would you use to capture failures in application code that's running in Google Cloud?
3. Cloud providers offer toolkits to develop SaaS applications. Name the service that AWS offers to build and host SaaS applications
4. True or false: We can use the backup solutions in Azure and AWS for systems that are hosted on-premises too.

Further reading

• Reliability and Resilience on AWS, by Alan Rodrigues, Packt Publishing
• Architecting for High Availability on Azure, by Rajkumar Balakrishan, Packt Publishing

Questions

1. What does the term ETL mean?
2. What would be the first step in building a data platform?
3. True or false: Data lakes are typically built on the common storage layers of major cloud providers such as Azure blob storage and Amazon S3.
4. What does Oracle’s GoldenGate do?

Further reading

• Data Lake for Enterprises, by Tomcy John and Pankaj Misra, Packt Publishing