A Complete Foundation For Success as a SaaS Provider

 

Zero Effort Single Instance Multi-tenancy

Single instance multi-tenancy is a software architecture principal where your application components such as your database, web services, and user interfaces are shared across many customers rather than each customer having their own copy.Single instance, multi-tenancy is one of the most important architectural qualities of modern day SaaS applications; it ensures a high level resource utilization without sacrificing quality, giving your business the ability to deliver SaaS with extreme cost effectiveness. However, single instance multi-tenancy is also one of the most difficult, time consuming, and expensive parts of a SaaS architecture to engineer and maintain.

Unmatched Product Management Control

In order to leverage the application configuration, metering and billing functionality of SaaSGrid, developers need only decorate their code with simple meta-data attributes that identify application components as pieces of functionality that SaaSGrid should monitor and control. From that point forward, creating different versions of the product requires no code changes. Once the application is deployed on SaaSGrid, the system recognizes the meta-data and provides a number of GUI tools that enable product managers to create different “flavors” of the application by mixing various combinations of pricing schemes and functionality bundles.

The Ultimate in Billing and Metering Flexibility

SaaSGrid allows billing and metering capabilities to be seamlessly integrated into your SaaS application. Through a simple API, engineers can define what transactions and parts of code are billable, making these features accessible only to those who have subscribed to them. Once the billable features or transactions are defined, pricing can then be managed externally in a zero code fashion. Business teams can manage the pricing and bundling of features through an easy to use web interface, creating any number of combinations and product editions. Your customers can also define a variety of payment methods, including credit card and ACH. SaaSGrid adheres to your pricing definitions, automatically creating invoices and processing payment requests against defined billing gateways using your customer’s preferred payment method.

Comprehensive Application Lifecycle Management

Deploying the first version of your SaaS offering is a huge milestone, but you’ll undoubtedly evolve your application over time and release new versions with bug fixes, updates, or entire application overhauls. SaaSGrid manages all application deployments through a versioning process, giving you an easy to use patching engine to apply patches for small upgrades and bug fixes or even supply entire replacement releases. You can issue updates to your application as often as you would like and have the peace of mind knowing that SaaSGrid has coordinated patching your application across all network resources, and migration of customer data and subscriptions. SaaS release management becomes as easy as clicking a few buttons and deciding when to deploy.

Flexible Subscription Management

Subscriptions define what your customers’ end users can access in your SaaS offering, along with details of what they’ve purchased and what they will pay you. No matter how you plan to sell your SaaS offering, you’ll need a way to manage the subscriptions. SaaSGrid provides significant subscription management capabilities, wrapping your application with this powerful and critical management functionality on deployment. SaaSGrid’s subscription management system tracks your customer subscriptions for the entire lifetime of that customer’s account, and automatically gives them the ability to change and upgrade their subscriptions while adhering to your published pricing structure and feature offerings.

 

Effortless On-boarding of New Customers

When you build and deploy to SaaSGrid, your application is instantly integrated into a powerful provisioning system for customer on-boarding. The SaaSGrid provisioning system allows new customers to supply information at sign up, which is then used to allocate resources, deploy necessary application components, and grant them immediate access to your application - essentially giving you the ability to “turn on” service for customers with no coding on your part.  This allows for low-touch, low cost customer on-boarding, keeping your business agile and removing any hurdles that might discourage new customers and slow down your path to revenue.

Fine Grained Access Control

The end user is a critical member of the SaaS ecosystem – after all, they’re the ones that will benefit from your SaaS application! This means that nearly all SaaS applications need a user system and the ability to secure various parts of the application with role based access control. SaaSGrid provides a centralized, pre-built user and role system that is tightly integrated with SaaSGrid’s own authentication, authorization, and subscription management systems. Leveraging SaaSGrid’s user system ensures that you can focus on your application and not auxiliary systems, but also guarantees that your customers can leverage their user, role and account information across new applications you may release.

Powerful Self Service Interfaces for End-users

Having the right management tools to oversee and administer your growing base of tenants and subscribers is necessary for the SaaS delivery model, but you need to take it one step further. SaaSGrid’s end-user self service portals allow you to offload the expense of nuisance customer service (password reset, etc), while improving the overall user experience by making basic services (like adding a user) instantly actionable. Offering these capabilities also increases the propensity for account growth – customers are more likely to purchase additional billable services if they can do so in a frictionless and automatic fashion, rather than having to jump through hoops (like phone calls) that place barriers between user demand and organic account growth.

Centralized Web Service Management and Configuration

If the application you build on SaaSGrid is service oriented, being able to track and version your web services is critical to both change management and upgrades. SaaSGrid keeps track of your web services, web service dependencies, and changes overtime in an easy to use catalog. Through the catalog, you can navigate your services in a logical view, and easily identify web services that you’d like to manually configure or even deploy to your SaaSGrid network. SaaSGrid’s ability to provide centralized service management and invoke an activation of the web service through a simple button click or machine targeted drag and drop action simplifies operational burdens significantly.

Seamless Load Distribution and High Availability

A subset of SaaSGrid's application component grid is a P2P SOAP request routing fabric that allows your web service capacity to scale seamlessly. SaaSGrid manages web service activation across your SaaSGrid server farm, high availability, and dynamically connects dependent peers to web service instances without the use of a centralized message bus. As demand for your SaaS application grows, you can be assured that you can trivially scale available capacity, helping you meet service guarantees you’ve provided customers. And of course, as with everything in SaaSGrid, the web service fabric is multi-tenant, preserving all context and information as requests are dispatched and ensuring data-safe sharing of stateless web services.

State of the Art Contextual Logging for Multi-tenant SaaS Environments

SaaSGrid provides a built in logging system and API purpose built for multi-tenant SaaS environments and the distributed server environment supported by SaaSGrid. The SaaSGrid logger gives developers the power to post traditional log messages and have them automatically enriched by SaaSGrid with information regarding the customer and user executing the code, the server which originated the message, and even gives the ability to override logging levels for specific customers – a true SaaS logger for enterprise grade SaaS applications.