Guide to SaaS DevOps

To win in the competitive SaaS (Software as a Service) marketplace, you need a quality product. But, a great idea and a solid initial build won’t guarantee market share. To grow your user base and revenue on (or ahead of) schedule, you must be able to:

• Deliver new code quickly and reliably
• Create a scalable, resilient application environment
• Offer users a killer experience

DevOps automation makes continuous delivery, high scalability and high resiliency easier to achieve than ever before – especially when combined with the functionality of Amazon Web Services (AWS). With DevOps, SaaS start-up and growth-stage companies are able to achieve strategic goals faster and offer a better user experience, gaining a much-needed competitive advantage and standing out in the competitive SaaS market.

What is DevOps

DevOps is a culture and set of practices that bring together development and operations teams to work collaboratively throughout the software development lifecycle. By integrating automation, continuous delivery, and monitoring, DevOps enables companies to deploy updates and improvements rapidly and reliably. This approach enhances the speed and quality of software delivery, helping businesses remain agile and responsive to customer needs while maintaining high standards of stability and performance.

The Power Of DevOps

Continuous delivery is mission-critical. Bugs and interruptions sap user confidence, making users less likely to evangelize your brand and more likely to use a competing service instead.

To compete with enterprise-level SaaS companies and gain an edge over other start-ups, you need DevOps automation. By automating every environment build – from development and QA to pre-production and production – DevOps lets you release new code as frequently as you need to instead of scheduled releases. This, in turn, enables you to resolve issues and make important improvements with lightning speed, keeping you agile and helping you meet customer needs (and expectations) as well as respond to new challenges in the competitive landscape.

Case in point: According to Puppet Labs’ 2015 State of DevOps Report, companies that implement DevOps deploy code 30 times more frequently, have 200 times shorter lead times and recover from failure 168 times faster. That’s a lot of golden opportunity to stay ahead of the pack.

Beyond speed, DevOps offers SaaS start-ups several other benefits, including better team collaboration, performance monitoring and profitability.

Getting Started With DevOps

To make DevOps automation part of your SaaS application strategy, you must:

• Evaluate your architecture and processes. To realize the dream of continuous integration and delivery, make sure your app and workflow are built to align with DevOps. Think microservices, self-contained but interacting functional blocks that, together, comprise your app as a whole. And, commit to compiling your code early and often; don’t save integration for the end of that waterfall you’re leaving behind.
• Map out deployment. In order to improve deployment speed and make continuous delivery a reality, map out every step of your deployment process from start to finish. Identify inconsistencies and standardize your process wherever possible.
• Automate deployment. Once you’ve mapped out and standardized your deployment process, automate delivery to the point at which anyone in your organization can deliver code with the push of a button.
• Automate testing. To prevent bugs from slipping through the cracks and make rollbacks easier, automate your testing process, too. Get your team on board with new testing protocols to fill every metaphorical crack.
• Alerting. Monitor every step of deployment with automated alerts to notify your team when something goes wrong, in real time.
• Tighten feedback loops. As your team gets used to receiving and addressing alerts, tighten feedback loops to increase your issue resolution velocity.

To get your DevOps program rolling, you’ll need an experienced Solutions Architect and several DevOps engineers in your corner. Your Architect’s primary role is to create the bridge between business, product and technical strategy. Your Architect assesses your business goals and needs, maps out key processes for automation and designs a robust, scalable cloud environment for application delivery. From there, your engineers execute, automating processes and monitoring activity in line with the Architect’s master plan.

Best Practices for Saas DevOps

With immense competition in the enterprise landscape to operate at maximum efficiency and get more done than ever before, many SaaS businesses are choosing AWS to build, scale, and deliver their services. AWS offers a reliable and secure foundation for building and delivering SaaS solutions. Leveraging AWS, Mission helps SaaS businesses create a personalized DevOps environment for creating the best solutions possible. This includes following the five best practices listed below, which are crucial for SaaS companies to maintain a competitive advantage and stay ahead of the game.

1. Create a Continuous Integration Process

Continuous integration allows you to build, test, and deploy your code in multiple environments. Developers don’t have to worry when making changes, as feedback is rapid and problems are easily identified when they arise. Changes don’t deploy until they are built and tested in a repeatable fashion. This early step in a CI/CD pipeline helps identify issues quickly and should be the first step that every SaaS startup should take.

2. Use a Continuous Integration Server

Deploying a continuous integration server lets developers put code through multiple environments and tests. This ensures stability across a variety of systems and increases confidence when deploying to production, allowing for faster product releases and updates.

3. Establish a Continuous Deployment (CD) Process

As a SaaS start-up, you want to systematically spin up a new environment or collection of servers and deploy code onto them for development, testing or production release. Software should be continuously ready for deployment. Think of this as the button-pushing process: When you have a new feature, the infrastructure is deployed, and the code is already written, ready and waiting to be launched.

4. Have a CI/CD Pipeline in Use

A CI/CD pipeline helps you deliver features and fixes to your customers as soon as possible. This strategy starts with building your application or feature, integrating it, and deploying it. This multi-step process ultimately works to prevents errors that might impact your users before they ever get deployed. If something slips through the process, the source will be easily identifiable, so you can fix it faster for redeployment.

5. Introduce Automated Testing into your CI/CD Pipeline

This is an important aspect of your CI/CD process that cannot be bypassed if you want to stand out amongst your SaaS competition. Legacy testing methods often slow the pipeline to a crawl and developers often see these methods as a roadblocks to continuous delivery. Automated testing allows you to get features in front of customers faster, with higher quality and greater security.

Implementation

Getting new features in front of your customers quickly increases your solution’s reputation and ultimately drives new customers. This is why it is especially important for SaaS start-ups to partner with an expert DevOps team. The faster you’re able to transform an idea or customer request into a feature of your application, the faster you’ll be able to determine that feature’s business value.

Implementing DevOps and CI/CD may seem like a major project to undertake, especially when your priorities should be focused on your SaaS product. However, CI/CD helps revolutionize the way you build and deploy your solutions. With Mission’s Managed DevOps, you can build the perfect pipeline for your needs. Mission’s AWS certified engineers provide ongoing services if you ever want to make changes or add new features. Mission’s Managed DevOps enables your team to focus on building the best SaaS solution possible without distraction. Learn more about what Mission can do for your company here.

FAQ

• How can small SaaS startups with limited resources effectively implement these DevOps best practices without a large, dedicated DevOps team?

For small SaaS startups looking to implement DevOps best practices with limited resources, focusing on automation, continuous integration, and delivery (CI/CD), and leveraging cloud services can be highly effective. By prioritizing these areas, even a small team can achieve significant improvements in efficiency, scalability, and deployment speed, making the most of their resources. Mission Cloud works with companies of all sizes to provide Managed DevOps. Learn more about our DevOps services here.

• What specific metrics or indicators should SaaS companies monitor to evaluate the effectiveness of their DevOps practices?

To evaluate the effectiveness of DevOps practices, SaaS companies should monitor metrics that reflect operational efficiency, product quality, and customer satisfaction. Key indicators include deployment frequency, change failure rate, time to restore service, and lead time for changes. These metrics can provide insights into the impact of DevOps on the business's ability to innovate and respond to market demands.

• How do these DevOps best practices align with regulatory and compliance requirements, particularly in heavily regulated industries like healthcare and finance?

Aligning DevOps practices with regulatory and compliance requirements involves implementing robust security measures, ensuring data protection, and maintaining clear documentation of processes and controls. For industries such as healthcare and finance, this may mean incorporating specific compliance measures into the DevOps pipeline, such as automated compliance checks and secure coding practices, to ensure that software releases meet regulatory standards