SaaS for Developers

You can't manage what you don't measure, and this includes your cloud costs. But how detailed should this measurement be? And how will the data translate into impact? I sat down with Adam Shugar, co-founder and CTO of Dashdive, to discuss his approach to cloud costs. He shared his advice, not only on cost cutting but also technology, growing a startup, the importance of community and more.

Bill Tarr has the most interesting job in the world. He and his team of SaaS Evangelists at the AWS SaaS Factory work with companies large and small to help them build SaaS on AWS. In this conversation, we discuss the different ways technology and business interact when building SaaS - from cool technical options available only to SaaS companies to the importance of knowing the cost of a tenant. T...

Ryan Worl, co-founder and CTO of WarpStream, is on a mission to re-engineer fundamental infrastructure on top of S3. Starting with metrics at Uber, continuing with Husky - DataDog's platform for events, logs and everything except metrics and then... Ryan thought "it will be cool to re-build Kafka on S3", reached out to other developers to hear their thoughts... and ended up building...

We invited Anna Povzner, director of engineering at Confluent, to the show to discuss Kora. Kora is a Cloud Native platform based on Apache Kafka, which her team at Confluent built. Anna and her team recently published a paper about Kora in VLDB 2023, and it won the industry's best paper award. Kora VLDB paper: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol16/p3822-povzner.pdf In our conversation, we discusse...

In the last year or two I started hearing a lot about cell-based architectures. Usually in the form of “We had a lot of issues scaling our infrastructure, but then we moved to cell-based architectures” and “I wish I’ve learned about cell based architectures earlier, it would have saved me a lot of pain”. As a result, I’ve wanted to share knowledge about cell-based architectures with this community...

Krishna Raman has many years of experience building platforms for developers. Now he's applying this experience at Delta Streams to build a serverless platform for stream processing in SQL. In our conversation, we discussed the serverless developer experience, some of the secret sauce behind Delta Stream's Flink Operator, how to deliver a bring-your-own-account SaaS, K8s network policies a...

You are a founding engineer at a SaaS startup. You built the MVP, and to everyone's great delight - usage is picking up. What's next? In this episode, Jeffrey shares how a messy MVP can gradually evolve into a scalable SaaS product. We discuss the critical design decisions engineers have to make in the early days of building the product: Tabs or spaces, pooled tenants or siloed, Micro-serv...

Did you know that Postgres that lets you write data that you can’t query? Events that will show up in the write-ahead log (WAL) of the database but not in any table. Gunnar Morling, senior staff engineer at Decodable and world expert on change data capture, walks us through data capture basics, this not-new but little-known feature, and dives into three key use cases (my favorite is the audit log)...

Andrew Atkinson took a Rails web application that was struggling with load, and optimized it to handle over 9000 HTTP requests per second with an average latency of 35ms end to end. Handling a much higher load, on a smaller RDS instance, with lower latencies. He then shared his expertise by writing a book: "High-Performance Postgres with Rails." Andrew and I discussed Postgres performanc...

Ensuring your production system is well-behaved is table stakes for any SaaS. The space around monitoring and alerting is complex and moving fast, so it is too easy to end up with results that are worse than useless. Alert fatigue is real, and developers must learn to avoid this. Shahar and Tal, founders of Keep and active SaaS Developer community members, joined me to discuss - why observability...

Cloudflare is no longer "just" a CDN serving 55M HTTP requests/sec; they now offer a wide range of cloud services on the edge. These services run on a data layer with 15 Postgres clusters running hundreds of databases. Vignesh Ravichandran, engineering manager of Cloudflare's database team, joined us to discuss the challenges of running this large-scale multi-tenant environment - dea...

Pinot team at Uber wrote an excellent paper about the real-time analytics platform they built. Chinmay, formerly a principal engineer at Uber and now head of product at StarTree, joined me for a conversation. We discussed the challenges they encountered at Uber, the solutions they came up with, the platform they built, and how to best apply their experience to companies much smaller than Uber. The...

Shayon wrote a great blog post on the guiding principles he and his team at Loom used to guide them as they evolved Loom's data platform through a period of hypergrowth. I invited Shayon to the show to discuss the challenges he encountered and how he solved them - and I learned that he is now at Tines - solving an entirely new set of challenges with a very different set of solutions. We discus...

Colt McNealy is re-imagining the future of microservices orchestration and he decided to build it entirely on Kafka Streams. In this conversation we discuss how Kafka Streams provides the low latency, reliability, availability and elasticity that is needed for the next generation of microservices orchestration. Colt also shares the most exciting up and coming improvements in Kafka Streams communit...

If you used a relational database at all, you probably heard of transaction isolation levels. Transaction isolation levels have a massive impact on the behavior of your application - correctness, performance, and error rates. Your database may be distributed these days, so you may have to reason about distributed transactions too. In this video, I explain transaction isolation levels with simple e...

YouTube and Twitter are full of “things developers should never do”. There's an endless demand for simple advice that applies in all situations. And that's not a bad thing. If there's a simple solution that works 80% of the time, this is valuable information. More practical than just "it depends." But advice-givers and advice-getters can do better. The best advice doesn't...

When developers talk about Serverless, they often focus on FaaS. But the best Serverless experience, by far, is delivered by a data store. S3. Why? Because it "just works" and lets developers focus on their code. Serverless databases help you focus on your queries and workload. They abstract the compute. Which also means - usage based pricing. In this video, Ram Subramanian, Nile's C...

The storage team at Airtable published a blog post describing, in detail, the migration of their petabyte-scale storage layer from MySQL 5.6 to MySQL 8.0. Andrew Wang, the lead of Airtable's storage team, joined us to discuss the migration, Airtable's storage architecture, data isolation levels, engineering culture, and more. The blog: https://medium.com/airtable-eng/migrating-airtable-to-...

SaaS applications are multi-tenant, so whether you are writing the first line of code in a new app or worried about scaling your successful SaaS fast enough - you need to be aware of multi-tenant requirements. Isolation, access control, perfornance, operations, scale and compliance    In this video, Ram Subramanian, Nile CEO and SaaS Community founder, shares what he learned about buildi...

Gunnar Morling asked a great querstion on Twitter: ""Separating storage and compute" vs. "Predicate push-down" -- I can't quite square these two with each other. Is there a world where they co-exist, or is it just two opposing patterns/trends in DB tech. ?"    Those are complimentary patterns and you definitely want them together. They appear contradictory because "separating storage and...

The last SaaS Developer video for 2022! Gwen talks about trends in the SaaS development space, and celebrates the growth of this community. Enjoy the holidays and we'll see you back with more SaaSy content in 2023! https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas

When you want to introduce new "Premium" pricing for your SaaS, it may look easy to add a field in the product. But are you sure it won't break the billing system? what about business reports? The last few weeks, my twitter feed was all about data contracts, and it was hard to see the real value behind the hype.    Benn Stancil, Chief Analytics Officer at Mode and one of my favorite thou...

A common challenge for SaaS products that got user adoption is balancing operational investments with a high speed of shipping new features. In the B2B world, moving fast and breaking things isn't an option. We need to move deliberately and reliably.  SLO, service level objectives, is a way to align the product requirements for availability with the engineering investment in operations. &nbsp...

SaaS applications typically have public APIs, and must be concerned with securing these APIs. Buchi Reddy answered many security questions on the SaaS Developer slack community, and we invited him to chat about his approach to API Security and how he sees the future of secure SaaS products.    Buchi and Gwen followed up and shared resources on the SaaS Developer Slack - secure container...

Access control is a vast and complex space. Dan Norwood will be our expert guide and take us from first steps all the way to advanced scenarios. We start with overview of the popular approaches, match them with customer requirements, learned how to integrate access control in existing architectures and then explore how a good product design can take access control from "must have" to a delightful...