SaaS, or Software as a Service, has revolutionised the way we do business today. When was the last time you installed an application on your laptop to do your taxes, or to interact with your social networks? I don’t think I ever have to be honest. So we’re all agreed then, SaaS is our present and will define our future. So what do SaaS companies have to gain by offloading the burden of running their cloud architecture? Why do SaaS Companies Love Working With Beaty Consultancy?
As developers we’re able to get most jobs in AWS and other cloud providers done ourselves, however, using Beaty Consultancy is a breath of fresh air as they are the consummate experts in the field. We save time and money (and gain peace of mind) by outsourcing our infrastructure work to Beaty Consultancy, freeing up our devs to work on the stuff they’re good at. Ricky is a great guy, fun to work with and always fair, and his staff are also friendly and know what they are doing.
- Max Revitt, Blockchain developer, and founder of Revitt Consulting
Focus
The people working within startup businesses have to wear many hats. That’s part of what makes startup life so fun and interesting. But that inevitably leads to a loss of focus on what those team members are really good at.
We work with startups every day who are behind on feature delivery because their developers are too busy patching servers, or figuring out the complexities of their AWS hosting environment to do their day job – coding! And that leads to developers who become demotivated, because they aren’t doing what they love doing. Instead, they’re babysitting a bunch of cloud mumbo-jimbo.
And that leads us on to the next big problem:
Quality
If you asked me to write a frontend in Node.js, or an API in Java, I wouldn’t know where to start. So by that logic it’s amazing that developers manage to hang cloud infrastructure together at all – but they usually do! And that infrastructure will probably work for a little while before showing any weaknesses. But the cracks always appear in the end.
In these kinds of environments, reliability and security usually take a back seat to speed and feature releases. Mark Zuckerberg of facebook (aren’t we supposed to all pretend it’s really called Meta now?) famously proclaimed “Move fast and break stuff”, but as you start to attract paying customers, you just can’t continue like that.
That’s when you need a specialist who lives and breathes only cloud infrastructure to review what you have, and suggest practical improvments.
Which leads us to our final point:
Pragmatic
In a world where developers want to develop, it stands to reason that cloud architects want to architect, right? Well yes, but also no.
Cloud architecture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The architecture exists to support the application, and ultimately to support the business. So when decisions need to be made, they should take a wholistic view of the whole environment.
For example, let’s say we rock up to an architecture workshop with your SaaS company, and together we discover you have some permissions set incorrectly on one of your S3 buckets which is used to store sensitive customer data. Well that needs fixed right away, and an investigation conducted to understand what kind of data was leaked, and which of your customers it affects. There are no ifs or buts in this scenario – if you lose your customers information, you lose their trust, and your business is toast.
But what about if we find that your platform is configured in such a way that stateful data is stored along with the application? That data is later stored correctly, backed up, and secure, but it means we cannot deploy auto-scaling to your environment. Worst case scenario – your app gets busy with an influx of new users, becomes overwhelmed and slows down, or ever crashes. That’s not ideal, but it isn’t a showstopper either.
At that point, we would have a discussion about what your user acquisition looks like, what your development pipeline looks like, and where in your list of priorities a problem like this really sits. In the mean time, we might do something super simple, like scale up (as opposed to scale-out) your server, so the configuration can stay the same, but your platform can support more users.
Well-Architected Support
We have a package of support targeted directly at cloud-first SaaS apps. Everything we do stems from the AWS Well Architected Framework, but also calls on our extensive background working with SaaS apps like Trustap, Coordinate, Workhorse and Tutor House to name just a few. And because our support plans are the product of years of industry experience, we can drive huge efficiencies and bring the cost down for everyone.
In some cases, we have saved our clients more money than our service costs via our Cost-Optimisation service as part of Well-Architected Support.
Get in touch today and let’s chat about how we can support your SaaS business.
