If you are a product manager of a SaaS product, then there additional things one needs to do to ensure a successful customer experience - Manage the cloud deployment.
Guidelines to choosing the best data center or cloud-based platform for a SaaS offering
1. Run the latest software.
In the data center or in the IaaS cloud, have the latest versions of all supporting software: OS, hyper visors, Security, core libraries etc., Having the latest software stack will help build the most secure ecosystem for your SaaS offerings.
2. Run on the latest hardware.
Assuming you're running on your data center, run the SaaS application on the latest servers - like HPE Proliant Gen-10 servers to take advantage of the latest Intel Xeon processors. As of mid-2018, use servers running the Xeon E5 v3 or later, or E7 v4 or later. If you use anything older than that, you're not getting the most out of the applications or taking advantage of the hardware chipset.
3. Optimize your infrastructure for best performance.
Choose the VM sizing (vCPU & Memory) for the best software performance. More memory almost always helps. Yes, memory is the lowest hanging of all the low-hanging fruit. You could start out with less memory and add more later with a mouse click. However, the maximum memory available to a virtual server is limited to whatever is in the physical server.
4. Build Application performance monitoring into your SaaS platform
In a cloud, application performance monitoring is vital in determining customer experience. Application performance monitoring had to be from a customer perspective - i.e., how customers experience the software.
This implies constant Server, Network, Storage performance monitoring, VM monitoring, application performance monitoring via synthetic transactions.
Application performance also determines the location of cloud services. If customers are in East coast - then servers/datacenters should be in east coast. Identify where customers are using the software and locate the data centers closer to customer, to maximize user experience.
5. Build for DR and Redundancy
SaaS operation must be available 24x7x365. So every component of SaaS platform must be designed for high availability (multiple redundancy) and active DR. If the SaaS application is hosted on big name-brand hosting services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud etc) then opt for multi-site resilience with auto fail over.
6. Cloud security
Regardless of your application, you'll need to decide if you'll use your cloud vendor's native security tools or leverage your own for deterrent, preventative, detective and corrective controls. Many, though not all, concerns about security in the cloud are overblown. At the infrastructure level, the cloud is often more secure than private data centers. And because managing security services is complex and error-prone, relying on pre-configured, tested security services available from your cloud vendor may make sense. That said, some applications and their associated data have security requirements that cannot be met exclusively in the cloud. Plus, for applications that need to remain portable between environments, it makes sense to build a portable security stack that provides consistent protection across environments.
Hybrid SaaS Offering
Not all parts of your SaaS application can reside in one cloud. There may be cases where your SaaS app runs on one cloud - but pulls data from other cloud. This calls for interconnect between multiple cloud services from various cloud providers.
In such hybrid environment, one need to know how apps communicate and how to optimize such a data communications. Latency will be a critical concern and in such cases, one needs to build in a cloud interconnect services into the solution.
Cloud Interconnect: Speed and security for critical apps
If the SaaS App needs to access multiple cloud locations, you might consider using a cloud interconnect service. This typically offers lower latency and when security is a top priority, cloud interconnect services offer an additional security advantage.
Closing Thoughts
SaaS offerings has several unique requirements and needs continuos improvements. Product managers need to make important decisions about how the applications are hosted in the cloud environment and how customers experience it. Making the right decisions gives the results for a successful SaaS offering.
Finally, measure continuously. Measure real-time performance, after deployment, examining all relevant factors, such as end-to-end performance, user response time, and individual components. Be ready to make changes if performance drops unexpectedly or if things change. Operating system patches, updates to core applications, workload from other tenants, and even malware infections can suddenly slow down server applications.
