Redgate worked with The Scale Factory to build a SaaS version of their leading database monitoring product.
Redgate have specialised in database software for over 25 years. Their solutions help organisations reliably solve the complex challenges of database management across the DevOps lifecycle, and they can count almost every Fortune 100 company amongst their customer base.
Redgate Monitor offers a single pane of glass view of customers’ database servers wherever they’re deployed, making it easier to ensure they’re running optimally, and simplifying problem diagnosis when they’re not.
The Challenge: SaaS Transformation
Traditionally, Redgate’s products – including Redgate Monitor – have been shipped as “shrink-wrapped” software, with customers installing, running, and maintaining the tool on their own on-premises or cloud infrastructure, but customer needs are changing.
“Increasingly we’re hearing from customers that they’d like us to host it and maintain it for them”, David Bick, Director of Product Portfolio, told us. “Monitor is a product designed to help you look after your production databases. It shouldn’t be another production database that you have to take care of.”
Redgate moved from perpetual licences to a subscription model around three years ago, a change which was successful, but it was now time to look at transforming the product into a pure SaaS platform. CTO Graham McMillan knew that some external help with this paradigm shift would be important.
“We could probably have got to a SaaS model ourselves in a couple of years, learning as we go,” says McMillan, “In fact, for various reasons we’ve tried to launch SaaS products in the past and been unsuccessful. Given the pressure from the market we don’t have the luxury of two years so we needed to go faster. That’s why we looked to for some trusted expertise in this area, and AWS suggested The Scale Factory”.
Redgate’s account manager set up the introduction because we’d worked with some of his other accounts. He recognised that our specialism in SaaS, from design to implementation, would be a good match for this project.
Moving faster with The Scale Factory
When choosing who to work with, it was important to Redgate to select a supplier that aligned well with their own organisation.
“On meeting The Scale Factory, it was clear there was a good technical and cultural fit”, McMillan says. “With everyone we met during that early phase, we aligned nicely. Everyone was really flexible, and willing to work collaboratively with us. We never got the sense that the engagement would follow some kind of predefined playbook, the way you might expect with other consultancies. They were going to do this with us, not to us”.
We kicked off our engagement with several design workshops, working closely with Redgate’s stakeholders to define the scope of the work and lay out a roadmap. The work began in August 2024 and the CTO set an ambitious goal to have a version of the product running in AWS by the end of the year.
“We all looked at each other and thought: let’s go for it!”, said McMillan.
Choosing the right cloud vendor
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, the decision Redgate took to build their SaaS product on AWS was one not taken lightly.
“We had more confidence that AWS was going to be the cloud for us”, the CTO told us. “They’re really conscious of how customers use the platform, and the value of stability in their APIs”.
From previous experience, McMillan was also familiar with the financial incentives AWS provides to customers building new or migrated workloads on their platform. Using our AWS partner relationship, we helped Redgate secure Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and other funding to accelerate their project.
The solution
We were able to move quickly on this project because we have a number of solutions to common SaaS challenges available as consulting packages that can be adapted to the needs of each customer.
We deployed our AWS Control Tower for SaaS solution, to provide a “landing zone”: a starting point for centralised, secure cloud governance. New AWS accounts created for Redgate are created using Control Tower and configured with an appropriate security baseline, designed in collaboration with Redgate’s security stakeholders.
Because the SaaS application runs in containers, we also deployed our Application Platform solution, which provides a serverless approach to application hosting, using Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate. The solution provides automated provisioning of AWS components, as well as CI/CD pipelines for software delivery using GitHub Actions, all without the need to manage servers and operating systems.
Because of the shrink-wrap roots of the Redgate Monitor solution, the software is built to serve a single customer per deployment. For the SaaS solution, we provision a single AWS account for each customer tenant, and deploy the Monitor components inside it, keeping this infrastructure distinct from that of other customers.
The application has a three-tier architecture: a web front end, an API-driven application, and a storage service. The core product was originally written in .NET to run on Windows but as part of this work, Redgate’s developers adapted the application components to run under .NET Core on Linux. These components are deployed as containers on top of the Application Platform, with container images built in CircleCI and stored in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR).
This wasn’t the only change: Monitor used to store data in Microsoft SQL Server, but since most of what they store is time series data, in this iteration Redgate elected to adopt TimescaleDB instead. This is an open source database product built on top of PostgreSQL. Here, it runs in Fargate containers, using a container imported from DockerHub into Amazon ECR. TimescaleDB stores data on Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) to facilitate high availability.
Security is front and centre in the platform architecture. Redgate Monitor was originally designed to run in customers’ infrastructure, with direct access to pull information from the databases it was monitoring. In the SaaS product, it was necessary to carve out these components into a separate monitoring agent, which the customer deploys on their own network. The agent pushes data to the SaaS platform, and this channel is secured using mutual TLS authentication, with certificates generated by a deployment of AWS Private Certificate Authority.
What Redgate said...
On meeting The Scale Factory, it was clear there was a good technical and cultural fit
Everyone was really flexible, and willing to work collaboratively with us. We never got the sense that the engagement would follow some kind of predefined playbook, the way you might expect with other consultancies. They were going to do this with us, not to us.
The results
Although the timeline was ambitious, by working together with the Redgate team, we were able to get a version of Redgate Monitor up and running by December 2024, around 85% faster than they’d have managed alone.
The SaaS version of Redgate Monitor is now in production for a number of preview customers, allowing Bick’s product team to learn how real users work with the product.
“I think everybody was pretty pleased by the really rapid progress we made”, McMillan told us. “We optimised for reliability and security, knowing we could come back to performance and cost concerns later”.
We’ve used the AWS Well-Architected review framework to assess the platform we’ve built and to identify areas for future improvement.
The future
The current Redgate SaaS Monitor is just the first step in a longer transformation. SaaS Monitor itself will continue to become more SaaS-native and take advantage of further AWS technologies and features. Alongside that, other changes will be required, both technical and organisational.
The company already provides 24x7 support for users of their existing products. In time, these teams will need to be able to support users of the SaaS platform too, and escalate any operational issues to the team that builds and operates the SaaS platform, who will now need to participate in an on-call rota.
Today, provisioning a new tenant onto the platform is a manual process. In future, it will be necessary to deploy a SaaS Control Plane to orchestrate this work and manage running tenants.
“We believe we’re probably missing sales opportunities from potential customers who come to the website, but bounce off when they see it’s not a SaaS product”, David Bick told us. Deeper integration with AWS Marketplace and simpler on-boarding will open the platform up to new customers.
The rest of the business is already benefiting from the work we’ve done together. With an established, mature approach to cloud governance in AWS using AWS Control Tower, Redgate have already identified applications that would benefit from being brought into the landing zone.
And, of course, Monitor is just one of several products in the Redgate portfolio. We’re looking forward to helping take the rest of these on a similar transformation journey.
