In this session, founder/CTO of BizTalk360 - Saravana Kumar shares his experiences, challenges, and lessons that he and his team learnt when they built their first SaaS based product(s) - BizTalk360 Cloud and ServiceBus360.

1. Saravana Kumar
Microsoft Azure MVP (since 2007)
Founder – BizTalk360, ServiceBus360
@saravanamv
saravana.kumar@biztalk360.com

2. Building a SaaS based
product in Azure
Challenges and decisions made…

3. Our SaaS Products
https://biztalk360.cloud https://servicesbus360.com

4. What is a SaaS product?

5. Key characteristics of SaaS products
• Scalable – both technically and financially
• Reliable - Cannot afford to have a downtime
• Smooth on-boarding
• Tenants are isolated
• Less Time to troubleshoot and fix
• Continuous delivery
• Less friction on payment

6. Main Azure Building Blocks
Azure App Services Azure Event Hubs
Azure Webjobs
Azure SQL Elastic Pool
Azure Storage Azure Key Vault
Azure SQL Database

7. External Building Blocks

8. BizTalk360 Cloud (High Level Design)
Event Hub
Processor
Customer
Provision
Email
Manager
Purge
Manager
Payment
Manager
Purge
Manager
Health
Manager
User
Manager
Core Web Jobs
Customer Specific Web Jobs SQL Elastic pool (per customer)
Core
Database
WebInterface(AzureAppService)
Customer
Customer
Customer
Customer
Customer

9. ServiceBus360 (High Level Design)
Customer
Provision
Email
Manager
Purge
Manager
Payment
Manager
Purge
Manager
Health
Manager
User
Manager
Core Web Jobs
Customer Specific Web Jobs SQL Elastic pool (per customer)
Core
Database
WebInterface(AzureAppService)
Customer
Customer
Customer
Customer
Customer
Customer Azure
Subscription
Customer Azure
Subscription
Customer Azure
Subscription

10. Agent – Event Hub
BizTalk Agent
Event Hub Processors
Instance 1
Event Hub Processors
Instance 2
Core
Database
SQL Elastic pool (per customer)

11. Event Hub –
What problem does it solve?
• You don’t need to worry about message
ingestion into Azure
• Without Event Hubs the solution would
have been complex with
• Load balanced Web API
• Scaling based on demand

12. Agent - challenges to address
• Two-way communication
• Ability to Force shut down
• Ability to push updates
• Ability to change Event Hub end points
• Ability to notify local errors to the server
• Ability to inform self health

13. Event Hub Processor (challenges)
• 2 Instances of Event Hub Processors
• Partitions are leased between these two instances
• When one goes down, all the partition leases are
allocated to the active Instance automatically by the
Event Hub Processor Factory

14. Storing
Customer(s) Data

15. What are the options?
• Single Database – all tenants in one database
• PROS: Easy to implement, Fast deployment
• CONS: Security, Scalability
• Isolated Databases – single database per
tenant
• PROS: Security, Scalability
• CONS: Harder to Deploy, Manage, Cost
predictability

16. We decided to go with Isolated
Databases
Challenges to Address
• Ability to run jobs (custom scripts) against all
databases
• Ability to query consolidated data across all
databases
• Avoid unnecessary cost for unused accounts
• Cost Predictability

17. Azure SQL Elastic Pool – is the Solution

18. Azure SQL Elastic Pool – core benefits
• Designed for SaaS
applications
• Can have mixture of small
and large databases within
the pool depending on
customer size
• Simple costing model

19. • There are limits on total number of databases you
can have in the pool
• Cost is something to note, even though it’s
consumption only model, the base price itself is
quite high, maintaining staging, dev environments
are challenging
Things to note with SQL Elastic Pool

20. Techniques for
smooth customer on-
boarding

21. Event Hub Processor
Instances
Customer
Provisions
Email
Manager
Purge
Manager
Payment
Manager
SQL Pool
Manager
Utility User
Manager
Core Webjobs
Customer Webjobs
DataBases
Pool Provisioned
Customer DB Pool
Core DB
Customer DB Provisioned
Provisioning When New
Customer Sign up and
activate the account
New Customers

22. Payment Processing

23. • Not storing the credit card details PCI compliance
• Ability to handle
• Recurring billing,
• Cancellations,
• Refunds,
• Upgrade/downgrades,
• Dunning (retry payment)
• VAT
Things to look

24. Don’t build your own
ChargeBee
(subscription billing)
Payment
Gateway

25. Bank
Account
Web
API Notifications like successful payment, failed
payment, card expired are posted to our
application via the Web API from
ChargeBee
How does it work?

27. Email
Processing

28. Host Instances
Orchestrations
Receive Locations
Send Ports
Customer DB
Monitoring
Service
(Customer
Webjob)
Core DB
Email Manager
(Core Webjob)

29. Deployment
Process -
Visual Studio Team
Services

30. • Full development build
• Front End Back End Development
• Full Staging build
• Front End Back End Staging
• Full master staging – Sync up
• Full Production Build
• Front End Back End Production
Multiple Build Definitions

33. Naming
Conventions

34. Follow correct naming conventions right
from the beginning
• sb360-prod-rg
• sb360-prod-appsvc-frontend
• sb360-prod-appsvc-backend
• sb360-prod-appsvc-backend-mon
• sb360-prod-appsvcplan-frontent
• sb360-prod-appsvcplan-backent
• sb360-prod-appsvcplan-backend-mon
• sb360-prod-servicebus
• sb360-prod-servicebus-eventhub
• sb360-prod-sql-elasticpool
• sb360-prod-sql-server
• sb360-prod-sql-coredb
• sb360-prod-storage

35. Active Directory or
Simple
Username/Password

36. 36Integrating with Active Directory Authentication

37. 37Resorted back to Forms Authentication

38. Thank You – Get Started
One Platform.
Operations, Monitoring, Analytics software for Azure
Service Bus
Get started with a free account
www.servicebus360.com