Saas inside sales model in IT architecture documentation

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um so hello everyone my name is drift I'm a solution architect here at Old Cloud um I'm in focuses on startups and isv customers uh both from Israel and email um in this session we'll cover the SAS fundamentals um I know that some of the content might be a bit with overlapping with uh with the Thomas presentation a few minutes ago but I will try to make it uh interesting uh we'll start with defining SAS and then we'll talk about what does it mean to be SAS we'll cover some of the most common models uh when talking about SAS and lastly we'll talk about architecture patterns and the core concept of SAS so if you already started the recording so we can go ahead and the uh the slides um if you guys have any uh questions or comments you can leave them uh in the chat and we'll review the later in the and if we have time later I believe we really have right um so let's start with a quick review of some of the most common misconceptions about SAS so the first is that you're only doing SAS if all your tenants are sharing the same infrastructure while our solution my uh strafe strive for this kind of setup tone minimize management overhead and maximize cost savings it's just not always possible to achieve this for every workload so you don't have to share your infrastructure to run a multi-tan sales business another thing here would be the automation if all you do is automate the deployment for a customer you're still not SAS there are a lot of other things you need to think about when coming to design a set solution it's just not only the operation here sometimes you'll hear people say that it doesn't matter what's under the hood and the size is only a marketing phrase so it's it's really not only a marketing phrase and we will just discover everything related to the technical details of a true size solution in this session in the upcoming session uh tomorrow and next week and lastly maybe because the salt solder started here but just having different databases for your customer doesn't make you sad well it's a common way to partition multi-tenant data but by no means it is the only way and again you should be thinking about all other things when designing your SAS solution so what is SAS so you can find a more concrete definition I know that tones also uh talked about the definition of SAS but this is from let's say from the isv perspective the first thing to understand about SAS is that it's not a technology it's a business model a mindset as Thomas already said this mindset enables you the the service provider the sv2 onward operate analyze and manage all tenants with a unified experience uh well such best practices rely on the acceleration and the efficiency of the onboarding and updating processes of your tenants and of your centralized management of your tents as well and we just we try to avoid any one of customizations ultimately a successful SAS architecture should enable the vendor to maximize the agility innovate more often grow to New Markets and segments and cut costs dramatically you can think about it this way now the priority should start from the outside in right you first have to operate the thing the right way then you'll have to build your thing the right way and lastly you'll have to build the right thing meaning you should prioritize your operations and customer experience over features and functionality this is what we call agility so you must ensure that you're operating your service right that you have the Automation observability and management up and running that you have support for customer onboarding updates and metering that you have communication Channel with your customer to have their feedback then you'll have to build your application right meaning you have to apply those such specific Concepts into your architecture you have to apply tenant isolation data partitioning SAS identity and so on um we'll get back to that later in in the following slides but if you take a look at the application only later on and then you should use the customer feedback and market research to build the best application and evolve as you grow to a new segments once you have the operational agility you can introduce any kind of feature seamlessly so in general when coming to provide a service you should always prioritize your agility of a functionality that's what makes this SAS now let's talk about agility when talking about agility we're talking about frictionless onboarding you should design your sub solution to enable minimal friction on the onboarding process of an attack the customer experience here is very important to to your overall service they expect the experience to be smooth you have to think about frequent releases you should build more frequently and release those changes much faster the customer should get your updates without any patching installing or disruption at all and service steering as well you should if possible offer multiple services for our customers that will make your customers and your business grow to multiple segments and markets supporting different use case CSM worklets you should have better time to buy meaning you should follow design principles and best practices and utilize the cloud by using managed services all this to reduce your time to value with every new release you can focus on development and provide your customers with the best application by doing so and shorter Cycles an important aspect to keep you competitive is to know your customer so you can design the best solution for it this should be done by quicker Cycles better communication and accurate targeting of our customers here you might introduce a new function to your business customer success so you can build better communication and relationship with your customers and tenant customizations you can ensure if possible provide your customer with some customization that will help them feel more comfortable in your platform this should not contain any custom feature or development effort that are too big to have a different setup but things like cosmetic changes or modifications or some features that you can enable or disable a doc this should be a great and and definitely you should be part of your offering well the business requirement will influence your architecture um and in the end it will pave your way to the best solution for your customers now what should it look like actually so you you already see that um but we're talking about the SAS blueprint the blueprint is basically your note star when designing your solution so what does it mean to be SAS it's mostly about the blue boxes and the diagram that surround your application right it's about the the operation lets you operate and onboard new tenants it's about assassin entity it's how you collect metrics and analytics for tenants in a multi-tenant environment it's how you uh connect your tent to a billing and metering system so you can buy provide a more accurate build for for the tenants and even devops it's not only your standard CI CD pipelines anymore there are very specific patterns you may need to follow to support multi-tenant Solutions so it's really about the uh the shell the blue boxes around your application um the gray box inside it is important right but you can put all kind of different systems and architecture inside and still call it SAS because you have the fundamentals running it of course you should think carefully and design our application to allow tenant isolation and all the other core concept of SAS now let's talk a bit about what's not SAS so you already saw that as well but uh this is a very important to understand um for most of the MSP model a provider will and manage different environments for the customer each customer we um yeah well each customer will have their own installation right and a customized version of your of your product so the commonalities between the SAS and msps mostly the fact that you are managing the environment for your customer but you know it's it's more than that because in the end we have a lot of differences between the Assassin and the MSP and it is the the blue box that says we just described them all right so some of them is the the tenant uh all the tenants should have the same version and an update or fix should go to all of them when we uh deploy one and the operation aspects should be uh with a unified experience for your side um mainly all those supporting services as we just described um and again SAS MSP both are totally valid ways to run your business but they're not the same and you shouldn't really uh you know confuse one with another um in fact you you'll see sometimes that MSP is the first step before transitioning to to through SAS solution let's have another look here even if you do some consolidations and also multiple tests in the same service this might still not be a true SAS right so in order to be SAS you still have to introduce all those components we just discussed um once you have those supporting services in place and you have that single pane of glass of glass for your body on deployments metrics Billings and and so on this is where you're running a true SAS application now let's talk about the let's say the application itself inside a SAS application so we do some fine uh we do have some let's say our main models when talking about SAS architecture the first will be the the Asylum model that's the the simplest model you can pick for for application that basically means that your transfer totally separated all the way from the front end through the back end to the data layer or any other related component as well uh the second one is the pull model here you're basically sharing everything between your tenants nothing is uh tenant specific and the isolation should occur in inside the application well as you might guess this approach is much harder to develop monitor build or operate in genre and then we have something uh in between right that that's the bridge model it's just kind of some kind of mix between The Silo and the tool uh this could use the same front-end layer with different backends or the same back end with different data layer or any other combination between the two across your entire application um the thing to understand here that is in every model we have its own let's say pros and cons and when designing your solution you should think about your needs your priorities and and trade-offs uh in order to choose the the model that fits you best in every layer or of your application um so as you might guess there isn't really a one-size-fits-all solution in SAS you should build your own based on your needs so let's uh find some of the let's say business realities so we do we do find in some of our customers that they're running uh two different setups the first will be a complete Silo model for the premium tier customers well the second we leverage the pull model for the lower tier customers well of course this setup might work for you only if you're offering those tours in the first place uh an important thing to mention here um this is not a bridge we have two completely separated systems from different kind of customers we don't we do not share any anything between those uh setup they're completely separate from each other so this is let's say uh one of the implementations that we that we see in reality Let's uh review some of the let's say pros and cons um so hopefully this is uh pretty straightforward by now but uh let's have it on in a silo model because all the infrastructure is absolutely isolated um this will be much easier with your compliance okay so you don't have to worry much about your compliance you can have different customers with totally separated environment um you don't really need to care about crosstalk impacts as a Noisy Neighbor because your point of separation is at the infra level and your blast radius is fairly low uh because you don't share anything between those uh tenants in the first place well some of the downsides however well it can be pretty pricey to run those 10 separately and your management deployment probably will be much more complex with uh with the seller model right for for the pooled approach you can you can see the opposite right because everything is shared you get better agility and cost you'll probably have better centralized management and deployment system but but you do have some down signs here too um you will probably have more challenges with compliance running this model and here you should basically accept some Crosstown impacts and she designed a system to handle that um also your blast radio series is pretty huge because you're you're sharing your infrastructure across your tents so if something goes wrong it's going to affect everyone so when you're designing your solution you should be aware of those pros and cons and plan ingly um let's see a few examples of uh implementing those of those Silo and pool models inside a real application so you can start with a silo compute layer and the shared pool storage you can go with a pulled compute layer as well and have both of them shared and if you seek better letter protection you can stay with a pulled compute but run your storage layer silo and eventually if your architecture supports this you can have both compute and storage pools but have a different cues for each tenant those are your let's say silos so as you can see you can mix those models ing to your needs that's why we don't have a single solution and it's important to understand your trade-offs with everything you choose so it's also important to understand that at the end of the day all the models will make you SAS um they're sharing the same goals and we are already discussed that um but frictionless onboarding you'll have that with both of the models zero zero downtime deployments unified proactive monitoring assassin entity uh and context um usage and conceptions metrics and centralized building so now that we understand that the common SAS models let's have a look at the key areas of the SAS architecture now one of the biggest things we see in multi-tenant environment is that the load varies um it's because new tents or or is coming and the ways that the tenants are consuming your resources might be different right some some might run bulk operation um some might not um and we cannot really accept expect that so simple scaling policy probably won't be enough here um so how do we align consumptions with activity when that activity can be really hard to predict right um another core part is the sustainity right so how do we bind the user to its relevant tenant uh how do we flow that context throughout our system how do we identify and authorize the user to its specific content um how do we make the process similar to the developer with the minimal implications so you should get this uh part done pretty early because it's going to affect everything else um how you build your microservices how you deal with data partitioning or are you even Implement isolation techniques and third we have to deal with that with the fact that the footprint of the data is going to be different between our tenants um so this is a pretty much related to the first point but specifically from the from the view of the data right so how do you deal with storage battlenex how do you minimize your stamped impacts at the at the intro at the data layer or how do you optimize your data costs lastly how do you design a solution to be agile right this is very important so we have to think about how to make frequent deployments uh while limiting the the blast radius uh we have to uh to to design our metrics to be proactive so we know when there's a problem before our customers and we need to know the health of our systems from the from the tan perspective right so those key areas are are basically very crucial to your application um so let's let's take a look at the at the Core Concepts of the architecture itself now we can start with the data partitioning so data partitioning is is basically how is the data organized and stored in a multi-tenant environment but when we're talking about data partitioning uh we're not we aren't referring to tenant isolation but totally separated uh two separated thing uh we're talking about how we are physically or logically storing the data for each stand for example if using S3 is a data store um you can build different packets per tenant or you can utilize prefixes for that um if you go with tent isolation so what does how does your architecture ensure that one tenant cannot access the resources of another 10 but this point is is very crucial to your business you must ensure that one tenant cannot get to another for example if you're using Silo model you can isolate returns with different accounts different vpcs or different subnets right depends on your architecture or if you're using eks you could go with uh different namespaces per tenant or completely different cluster so the third thing is the Assassin's identity so how do we connect a user identity to its relevant tent and how do we flow that construct throughout our system for example um you can use let's say uh your SAS context you can insert it inside your jaw if you if you're using a jaw so in that case you can have the session entity flow throughout your system and onboarding um so how do we introduce Newtons to the system what does it mean to register a new tenant um so you can basically utilize code Suite Cod build called pipeline all of this uh kind of uh services from AWS for running our cloud formation stacks and deploying the the relevant Los services for each tenant you know given that you're using uh AWS managed services and you know um you can you can totally do that and during how do we offer different experience to to tenant at different price points right for example if we have premium interior or regular steel or gold silver bronze you name it all right so if you're using API Gateway for example you can Implement uh you can Leverage The the API keys with usage plan for applying different settings for each turn um metering and billing uh that's our last Point here um but this is basically how can we measure a tenant's conception and generate an accurate bill right for example if you're running on a silo model um you can probably tag your resources with with the tenant ID so you can later use your billing tools to aggregate all the tenant resources now those Core Concepts are of course in addition to any other best practice you should follow um and those are relevant for any SAS solution right no matter what model application uh service or product it doesn't matter you have to apply those Concepts to every layer of your system now well you can use AWS services for your solution and you should in order to have a better time to Value but you must know that even here there isn't one solution and every service might look very differently Insider architecture um so let's let's take for example dynamodb so the approach to multitancy for dynamodb is going to look very different from let's say open search or RDS same goes for messaging or the compute services or any other service you're using so when designing your solution each service needs to be addressed separately to support multi-tensity let's have a quick overview on the operational aspects here so you should treat your operations as part of your application right it's not just the application Ops anymore that you have the the knock and you have to have let's say uh one backend for all or stuff like that um you have to design your operation to support multi-tensity you have to design your operation to support your SAS solution so you can have um let's say more tent aware dashboards and understand better what's what what's the status of each tenant is so you can have uh logs per tenants and you can have a tenant contacts inside the logs and contacts inside a matrix um you should also support peer-based deployment right if you can push update to all your keys on Silo pooled doesn't matter if you have uh premium Interiors users or not um you should also have some Advanced deployment mechanisms as well you should be able to do dark launches can I release this a b testing and you should able to roll back if something goes wrong um you should build this as soon as you can and you know include every single component you're running inside a system into your uh operational dashboards uh because in the end you'll have to have those uh tent aware dashboard in order to you know move with your business a much faster and much uh let's say into another aspects and another markets so we have let's have a quick reminder here um in SAS we're making the the conscious decision to avoid any one of uh deployments um and we'll give we will give up an initiative to close the sales deal that will result in one or version of service um so in that case we can keep the efficiency and Agility of running the same solution for all our customers right um so taking the choice will enable us to to grow our customers base even more and make up for that uh potentially lost deal um now you can however um support customization through feature Flags or some kind of other fundamental service in your solution um that's okay because in the end it will provide the same functionality for all your tenants and you can turn it off or on um for each individual attendant to fit it so let's uh sum it up and I see that we already have some uh a few minutes left for the for the questions so it's good thing um a few of the key takeaways here is that SAS is a business model right it's a mindset which in which your product is shipped as a service um another thing is that not every service provider is a SAS provider and we already covered that with uh with the MSP part and you should probably promote agility and customer experience as top priorities you should design each layer with a model that fits you best and also you should design your system to support multi tendency by applying the SAS core architecture Concepts that we just discussed you should also design your operational model to be turned aware and support your business needs and you should serve each tenant with the same experience and allow quick Cycles in the end um there isn't really one-size-fits-all solution in SAS so you can and so you need to build your own based on your requirements all right so you can find your office hours so if you want to have a deep dive session with us so we can have a discussion uh of your specific use case please send your email to to the mailbox and someone will get back to you as soon as possible