What is SaaSGrid? (Conceptually)

The best way to think of SaaSGrid is through the “operating system” analogy. SaaSGrid is a software layer that sits below your application on the software stack but above traditional middleware and infrastructure resources like Windows Server, Microsoft’s SQL Server and IIS.

SaaSGrid's Two Primary Themes

• 1. Providing your application all it needs to be an enterprise class SaaS offering.

SaaSGrid provides your application with an “inheritable” SaaS architecture, allowing your application to truly be a full-fledged SaaS offering. With very little effort, a relatively traditional Microsoft .NET web application will take on a complex architecture with features such single instance, multi-tenancy and linear scale-out while benefiting from pre-built components such as provisioning, pricing, billing and subscription management engines.

• 2. Abstracting your application stack away from the underlying OS stack, thereby providing complex management and execution of your application across an arbitrary number of networked servers.

SaaS applications have complex scale and availability requirements. Traditional “anchored” systems where application components are deployed to well known locations are not conducive to trivial scale-out, lack the intelligence to easily integrate new application capacity into the application runtime, and have no ability to dynamically partition load against first class SaaS concepts such as application customers. SaaSGrid’s “application component fabric” takes on the responsibility of providing a deployment and execution backdrop where application components can be trivially provisioned and load easily re-distributed across a ever=growing server farm supporting your application.

SaaSGrid Delivers on these Themes via a Number of Systems that are Purpose-Built with SaaS in Mind.

• A multi-machine application server and runtime for hosting and managing SaaS applications

• Instrumentation and transformation engines that partition your application’s components across tenants so that you can achieve the highest level of efficiency. This means that parts of your application, such as your database, can be written as if they were for one customer (e.g., storing row data naively with no notion of customer ownership) but when running on SaaSGrid, will concretely behave in a multi-customer fashion (e.g., your database will be instrumented to support multiple customer data storage in a way that is transparent to your application queries)

• A user and customer management layer that your SaaS applications can leverage

• An API and set of associated services that provide fundamental building blocks for commercialization, user/account management, and provisioning (either by you or through pre-built storefront widgets that allow your customer to self provision)

• Enterprise class server mechanics such as automatic high availability, linear scale-out across your server farm, and failure isolation

• A set of web portals and tools to manage your applications and customers