SaaS for Developers

The best cloud experience is a serverless experience. Billing is usage-based, and services scale automatically based on demand - reducing costs and the operational burden for most use-cases. Building a great user experience for serverless platforms is not easy - you need a great architecture and a bit of magic to pull it off.   

Companies that take existing software and manage it in the cloud have the opportunity to rethink their architecture and use cloud services appropriately. The resulting system is often cheaper, simpler, more elastic, and more manageable.   

Neha Pawar, a founding engineer at StarTree Data and a PMC member of Apache Pinot, recently published a blog post about her experiments with tiered storage for Pinot. We had an in-depth conversation about how they approached the architecture change and the challenges of achieving reasonable latencies with cloud object storage like S3.  

And the big question: Why did otherwise reasonable engineers decide to tackle this project's prototype over a weekend?  

Interested in more SaaS? Join our Slack:  https://saas-community.github.io/ 

The blog post: https://www.startree.ai/blogs/introducing-tiered-storage

Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/KishoreBytes/status/1503075370240659462

Can you use your product while you are building it? What is one architecture trick that makes serverless easy? How do you build a call center in two weeks? And what is the right number of managers for a team?

I invited Yoav Abrahami, chief architect at Wix, to tell the SaaS Developer Community how Wix uses Wix products to build other Wix products. We've ended up covering a lot of great topics:

Interested in more SaaS? Join our Slack:

https://saas-community.github.io/

Puneet and Lior from Amberflo share the story how and why AWS decided to price S3 with usage based billing. We also learn what is metering, how it is different from monitoring and why it matters. And finally, practical tips on how to implement metering and apply a usage-based pricing strategy.

Migrating from a simple, working, homegrown orchestration to Kubernetes. Why would you do that? And what will you learn once you do?  Gianluca, now engineer at Aerosearch, shares stories from his time at InfluxDB, when they migrated their cloud to K8s. He tells the story, and shares important advice on learning, advocating, making tradeoffs and even the secret to hiring great engineers.  

Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/

Users of Infrastructure SaaS expect to see metrics and receive notifications about the state of the system. But what metrics to expose? Who do you notify? And how to avoid oversharing?  This videos are packed with useful tips by Dustin Cote, product manager at Confluent who spent 3 years figuring this out. We start by talking about metrics, and then switch to notifications at around minute 18:00.   Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/

We know quality when we see it, but what makes a product truly great? And what does it take to build a great product?  

In this video, Gwen shares her view of what makes products great, gives examples of great products, and shares some tips on how to build one. 

  Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/ 

Quality links: 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0063HC7EQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Creating unique user experiences: https://www.amazon.com/Badass-Making-Awesome-Kathy-Sierra/dp/1491919019

Control charts, like SLO, but more flexible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_chart

Statistical tools for quality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_basic_tools_of_quality

You log in to Confluent Cloud, you click on "create cluster" and soon after the cluster shows up, the UI shows a nice message, an email arrives in your mailbox with details about the cluster and the usage of the cluster shows up in your next credit card statement. It is a nice and smooth experience.  

In this video, our guest, Ram Subramanian, former VP of Eng at Confluent discussed what actually happens behind the scenes and what it took to build this great user experience.   

This is the first video in our new "SaaS Stories" series. Let me know if you want to share your story on our channel.  

 Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/

Willing to help my product discovery efforts? https://forms.gle/k3Rai3af1BN6D8c2A

API Economy is booming and provides many services that make SaaS development easier. Adding great public APIs to your product is also easier than ever.   

In this episode, Gwen Shapira, usually the host of the channel, shared everything she learned about APIs, API Economy, and building great public APIs in the last week.   

Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/

Willing to help my product discovery efforts? https://forms.gle/k3Rai3af1BN6D8c2A 

Great links I found in my API research: 

Very detailed writeup from a business perspective: https://www.notboring.co/p/apis-all-the-way-down 

A great podcast episode about SaaS in general with good insights about API economy: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0kEiIDcv1i2OzIEi2xuRI7?si=nnPEE4fURTidQy0NNnrwdw&nd=1 

The contrarian take: https://www.swyx.io/api-economy/ 

Jamstack - using the API economy to get away with no backend: https://jamstack.org/ 

World of APIs: https://www.postman.com/explore 

Swagger example of generating docs and examples from a spec: https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis/AnaMCD-lab/my-petstore/1.0.0#/pet/addPet

Modern SaaS applications increasingly turn to consumption-based billing - a payment scheme in which customers pay based on resources used. This flexible billing is very popular with users but can be challenging to implement. Metronome CTO, Scott Woody, joined us to explain why usage-based billing is so crucial for the SaaS business model - and what it takes to get it right.