SaaS Architecture – Past and Present
The topic “SaaS”, which was once such a disputed topic, has now been widely accepted. The increase in the adoption as well as the new technology innovations such as cloud has significantly evolved SaaS architecture. In this blog I have tried to take a look back and see what constituted SaaS architecture then and what constitutes now.
| Topic | Past Approaches | Present Approaches |
| Infrastructure Security | Security Policies | Offered By Cloud |
| Security Audits | ||
| Firewall | ||
| Anti-spam | ||
| SSL | ||
| Application Security | Form based authentication | SSO with AD/ OpenID Connect/ WS-Federation |
| Role based Control | Multifactor authentication | |
| Claim based identity | ||
| Granular privileges | ||
| Row and Field level privileges | ||
| Tenant based ACL | ||
| OAuth based access | ||
| User Audits and Event Audits | ||
| Transactional change audit and Analysis | ||
| OWASP Standards | ||
| Scalability | Load balanced Webservers | Elasticity |
| Sharded database | ||
| Asynchronous operations | ||
| Cloudwatch/Azurewatch | ||
| NoSql database | ||
| Distributed Caching | ||
| Availability | DB Replication and Failover | Multi availability zone database failover |
| Multi availability zone application failover | ||
| Performance | 5-10 seconds | Subsecond |
| Integration | Excel Import | Rest services |
| Excel Export | Webhooks | |
| Configurability | Custom code | Configurable Workflow |
| White Labelling | Configurable UI | |
| Configurable Logos and Themes | ||
| Configurable Forms and Grids | ||
| User Interface | Html and CSS | HTML5.0 |
| Flash/Applet/Silverlight | SPA | |
| Javascript frameworks | ||
| Realtime updates | ||
| Responsive Design | ||
| CSS Framework | ||
| Native Apps | ||
| Analytics | BI | Big Data |
| Manageability | ‘N’ layered architecture | Dependency Injection |
| Exception logging | AOP based instrumentation | |
| Cloud log management service | ||
| MVC/MVVM | ||
| Tenancy | ASP Model | Multi tenant Architecture |
| Single Tenant | Tenant Hierarchy | |
| Support for reseller management | ||
| Customer Service | Implementation and Operations Team | Self service |
| Deployment | Self-Hosting | Virtualization |
| MSP | Public Cloud | |
| Private Cloud | ||
| Hybrid | ||
| Management | Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) | SaaS Lifecycle Management (SLCM) |
SaaS architectures have grown leaps and bounds in the last decade. Today SaaS space is flooded with numerous options for SaaS application development. More importantly people have started looking for unified solutions (like TechCello’s SaaS Starter Kit) that can tie all the above pieces together.
Let us wait and watch where this goes in the future J
Techcello’s SaaS Multi Tenant architecture encapsulates all the above areas in to a SaaS Starter Kit and continues to be the fastest way to build SaaS product for ISVs. To read more about it click here.
In case of any queries please feel free to contact me at [email protected]
