Our customers don’t want IT infrastructure; they want to succeed at their core business. Typically, our consulting work is with firms who provide Software as a Service (SaaS): a sector where you’ll find suppliers at all scales. The largest SaaS businesses turn over billions annually. The smallest are tiny, two- or three-person teams; often the firm’s founders.
Your customers care about value. For this sector, I think success very, very often looks like a keen focus on the value you’re offering, and a willingness to go elsewhere for any element outside your unique proposition.
This article is about how and where you can pay money to get those details dealt with - along with context about how to decide.
Customer experience as a service
There’s always an end user, and their experience always matters. Even if all you offer is an API - more and more common, to be honest - it still has consumers who care about the experience interacting with it and developing against it.
With a typical SaaS app, user experience can mean the difference between people getting great value, or outright failing at a key task. Unless your firm is in this specific niche itself, consider relying on a provider for services to measure and protect user experience. Building your own tools, libraries and systems is likely to cost significantly more than the value you’d get from doing that.
Using a something-as-as-service delivery model helps you, too: you shouldn’t need to choose between building something soon and building something usable. Capturing customer insights can (in some markets, should) become part of the way you deliver any component.
Some of those bought-in solutions offer amazing integrations - that, again, you’d struggle to build for the price - so that you can bring in feedback from actual app use alongside the messages you get from customers, and easily refer to these in your Slack conversations, Teams calls, support knowledge base entries, and more. It’s great to have the option.
Observability as a service
Making a recommendation here is trickier. It’s tricky because, at scale, the services that feel easy to use and work great have a problem: they can cost a lot. The most cost-effective options don’t offer great ergonomics. With usage-based billing as the norm, your firm can find itself caught between the low event volumes of a startup and the custom pricing that a large enterprise can negotiate.
My advice here is: avoid picking the cheapest thing just for cost’s sake, and when you do pick a provider, plan how you might one day migrate. For a small firm, it’s rarely worth making and running your own solutions for metrics, logs or traces. As you grow, the right answer and the choice to buy or build are likely to change.
If you are at a small scale and you’re sure you’ll grow: optimise for that migration away. Pick something that suits you well enough and that will be easy to switch away from if or when you need to.
Governance as a service
If you ask someone for an off-the-shelf set of policies that are right for your business, they won’t fit. Some things don’t work as generic offerings and governance is one of those.
It’s not all bad news, though. Once you’ve worked out what approach and what policies are right for you, there are cloud services that can be worth checking out. You just have to bear in mind there’s really no one-size-fits-all approach.
On AWS, setting up GuardDuty for security alerts is a good starting point; we do that as part of our Foundational Landing Zone package. Even then, you’ll need processes and the right people in place to respond to the alerts; the technology only gets you so far.
My colleague Adam wrote in 2023 about SaaS tooling for compliance automation and that advice still stands. To add to that, I want to emphasise a point that compliance and governance overlap, but they’re not the same thing. There’ll be areas of how you operate where governance, even specifically technology governance, really matters - but you’ve no need to show that the way you do it follows some standard. Compliance is something your customers might care about; governance is always about what you and your key internal stakeholders care about.
Collaboration as a service
There’s so much in this area that I’ll only scratch the surface.
Code management tools like GitHub and GitLab are at the top of my list. Imagine working on the cloud without them and I think you’ll easily see why. If you’re a remote-first or remote-only firm, next up are the Teams / Slack / Mattermost / Discord tools for live and asynchronous communications. A must-have to many, even if you’re based in an office.
I doubt you were expecting to run your own email, or text chat, or source code collaboration system. Today’s cloud world means you don’t have to. I’d actually file some alerting and monitoring tools here. It depends on how you use them. Something like PagerDuty can be set up primarily as a way for people to notify their colleagues about a big problem, and to be sure that someone’s assigned to fixing it. You may well not need to run any of your own incident management tooling at all.
More and more tools that you can run locally or inside a CI/CD context also have a cloud option. HashiCorp Cloud Platform (previously known as Terraform Cloud) is a way to run tools like Terraform but with the execution happening inside a managed context. It costs money, but some things you can do there are just way simpler than making your own solution. Maybe you’ll come across problems that initially look easy to solve with an infrastructure team size of one or two. But an effective fix can get tricky as you scale your staff, and cloud tooling is there to help.
Bringing it back
What’s common across nearly all our clients is that they don’t want any infrastructure, at least not if they can help it. It’s an easy idea to explain in a sector where making things somebody else’s problem is all part of the value proposition.
Also in common: those four examples. Each of them covers an area where there’s obvious value in having the outcome. A typical SaaS firm has the in-house expertise to make its own solution, and the cloud gives you a place to run it. What’s really nice is that you probably won’t have to.
We’ve been an AWS SaaS Services Competency Partner since 2020. If you’re building SaaS on AWS, why not book a free health check to find out what the SaaS SI Partner of the Year can do for you?
This blog is written exclusively by The Scale Factory team. We do not accept external contributions.
