Presented at AWS User's Group Melbourne, 25 July 2018
Follow our journey to building a SaaS product on AWS using serverless technologies to get the isolation benefits of single-tenant design, with the operational cost benefits of multi-tenant platforms.
We cover business problem, solution evolution from prototype to prod, automation and security concerns.
3. We @ orchestrated.io
We're a boutique consultancy that's been helping
large organisations transform their culture,
using a sensible mix of modern business &
engineering practices.
4. Our Products
people
1000s of them
dependencies
100s of concurrent projects
budgets*
substantial ones
1. Distributed, detached data drives critical decisions. Over-reliance on Excel & PowerPoint!
2. Too much data for humans to reason about. Insights module focuses attention on key
parts.
3. We built an internal tool to support our consultancy first. Now polishing for general
release.
Observations:
6. SaaS (Software as a Service)
Just a few of the concerns in making a SaaS tool acceptable to
the Enterprise's data crown jewels:
7. SaaS Infra: Single-tenant or Multi-tenant?
• More client flexibility
• Faster and simpler
backups and restorations
• Enhanced security
• Blast Radius is minimized
• Expensive per tenant
• Simple rollout process
• Zero tenant provisioning
time
• Better scalability?
• Blast Radius is large
• Cheaper per tenant
Single-tenant Multi-tenant
45. What we’ve learned in building a SaaS tool
Single Tenant is beautiful in terms of Data Security and Isolation
Not everything is as scalable as marketed (test & observe!)
When possible, use Serverless else Containers
Tag/Label everything, We thank ourselves for this every day
The hard part is not building the App, securing it is. Invest in security early
When using an AWS provided service, understand how traffic flows in and out
Testing locally is a challenge, use docker & create plugins for others to use
Automation is the key, helps you to be bold in integrating new tech faster