For SaaS Development, AWS is the Best Choice

Thinking of jumping on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) trend? There’s no better time than now. By 2025, 80% of business apps will be SaaS-based.

The average spend for SaaS applications per company has steadily risen each year over the last decade. A number of trends, such as AI-empowered SaaS and vertical SaaS, will expand opportunities even more.

Decision-making for SaaS Development Projects

So, let’s say you’ve decided to pursue a SaaS application development project. You’ve built a business case. You’ve identified your target audience and their needs. And you’ve defined the project’s business requirements, specified the features, and selected a monetization model. But what about actually building and deploying the app?

Do you have in-house resources to handle the project, including app development, quality assurance, and deployment? Does your team have the expertise to determine if you should go with single-tenancy or multi-tenancy architecture? What about integration with other services using APIs?

What programming language will you use? You’re also going to need a secure, scalable database and message queuing (MSMQ) technology to help your apps send and receive messages with third parties.

You need to make all of these decisions before your actual SaaS development can take place. Among the most important choices is selecting the cloud platform to power it. At ClearScale, we’ve found AWS to be the most flexible, reliable, and secure platform for developing, testing, hosting, and running SaaS applications.

Why Build SaaS Apps on AWS?

Few cloud providers can match the depth and breadth of tools that AWS offers for all aspects of SaaS development. It starts with AWS’ secure, scalable, and reliable global computing infrastructure.

AWS employs an end-to-end approach to securing and hardening this infrastructure, including physical, operational, and technical measures. It also achieves third-party validation for thousands of compliance requirements, including PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FedRAMP, GDPR, FIPS 140-2, and NIST 800-171.

Choice is one of the biggest benefits AWS offers. That includes the choice of compute services: virtual server hosting, container management, and serverless computing. Because AWS is platform-agnostic, you can also select the operating system, programming language, web application platform, database, and other services that make the most sense for your business.

With tools such as Autoscaling and Elastic Load Balancing, you can scale your app up or down based on demand and only pay for the resources used. There are no long-term contracts or up-front commitments.

AWS also provides a broad range of capabilities that can align with the uptime requirements of SaaS environments. To ensure you can reach customers across a broad range of geographies, the AWS Cloud spans 90 availability zones (AZs) within 28 geographic regions around the world – numbers that are continually growing.

AWS is also continually adding new services and capabilities, such as those powered by AI and machine learning. These services not only enable the creation of next-generation SaaS solutions, but also allow for integrating competitive and market-disrupting features.

If anything, the range of SaaS tools and architecture options can almost be overwhelming. AWS helps here too. For example, the AWS SaaS Factory offers a variety of prescriptive enablement resources to empower and enable each stage of a SaaS project. It covers things such as the fundamentals of identity, data partitioning, and tenant isolation, and highlights the challenges and strategies associated with building next-generation SaaS apps on AWS.

AWS and Core SaaS Features

Here’s another reason that ClearScale’s preferred platform for SaaS development and deployment is AWS. It adeptly addresses the implementation of the core features of SaaS apps. This includes:

• Access Management to Product Features and Functionality. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) manages and limits access to existing resources and applications across all platform entities.
• Cross-Tenant Event Tracking. SAAS tenants are isolated by their configuration settings, deployment, and building process. If a cross-tenant event occurs, it must be logged with a detailed use case description and tenant identification data. Applications incorporate logic to request secondary authentication in this case.
• API Protection. Tenant-facing APIs use encryption for all the data in transit, and require client authentication, using appropriate standard methods to obtain the authorization token.
• Secure Access to AWS Resources. IAM policies restrict access to AWS resources dedicated to a particular client. Data is encrypted at rest using keys stored in AWS Key Management Service (KMS). Shared resources utilized by API layers are secured in accordance with AWS best practices so they can’t be accessed by tenants directly.
• Customer-specific Configuration. AWS enables building products with highly customizable UI capabilities that meet the unique requirements of separate tenants.
• Customer Lifecycle. AWS also enables processes for tenant onboarding, suspension, and offboarding to ensure smooth customer experiences and to maintain high standards for security and data preservation. That includes detailed procedures for changing customer state, including initial registration, activation, implicit (no traffic or active users), and explicit (disconnected from the SAAS platform APIs) inactivity.
• Performance Monitoring. Once a tenant onboards into the SAAS platform, you can monitor its activities using services such as Amazon CloudWatch or CloudWatch Logs.
• Automated Scaling. AWS Auto Scaling can scale all apps deployed within the project.
• Zero Planned Downtime. To avoid any downtimes, the CI/CD pipelines must be developed with seamless deployment practices in mind. For example, many successful SaaS projects utilize “rolling update” deployment techniques supported by AWS services such as Elastic Container Service or Elastic Beanstalk.
• High Availability. AWS offers multiple options and best practices to ensure high availability for SaaS applications, such as AWS managed services in Multi-AZ configurations (examples: ECS, Elastic Load Balancing, RDS, and ElastiCache); deployment of EC2 applications as Auto Scaling Groups in multiple availability zones; and automatic disaster recovery through AWS regions.

ClearScale Is Your AWS SaaS Development Partner

At ClearScale, AWS is our preferred platform for SaaS development and deployment. That’s based on extensive first-hand experience. We’ve helped numerous clients across all industries successfully create SaaS solutions. In fact, it’s that experience that has allowed ClearScale to earn AWS SaaS Competency status.

If you’re considering building a SaaS solution, talk to us. We can discuss your options, including the use of a multi-tenancy approach. We can also work with you to design and develop multi-tenant SaaS apps, leverage automation tools to deploy and support infrastructure, and provide ongoing cloud managed services.

Are you interested in a free SaaS assessment? You’ll come away with a clear understanding of AWS’s best practices to use when designing architectures for your SaaS applications.