In Part 1 of this blog, we discussed the common pitfalls of the monolithic approach. Go read that one first!
The benefits of a dedicated environment approach
Given the flexibility and agility it entails, the advantages of taking a dedicated environment approach to building your SaaS product trump those offered by a monolithic SaaS model.
There are several solid arguments for choosing a dedicated environment approach when building your Saas product.
The most compelling is that it enables you to take an unparalleled customer-centric focus. With this approach, each client will have its own dedicated and separate environment, enabling you to be more reactive to your customer’s needs.
For instance, if customers require their data to be stored in a particular region, you just deploy an instance there. And that is not all - whatever a customer will do will not impact others like it can happen in the monolithic approach.
Secondly, your infrastructure will scale horizontally; you will not have to worry that much about scaling. Instead, you can focus on further building and expanding on your product, as the infrastructure scales horizontally.
As you grow, your infrastructure will grow too, but will be easier to maintain, and will be able to accommodate variations in your client’s consumption.
Imagine the comfort of knowing you do not have to scale for peaks. Once a customer upgrades, downgrades, or cancels their subscription, your infrastructure can scale accordingly. This means your product has a hard tenancy - with each customer having their own environment.
As mentioned previously, analytics is a critical component, which gives you real-time oversight of your day-to-day activities and their impact, as well as fuel your future roadmap.
With a dedicated environment approach, you will know how much each of your customers is using up, and you will be able to match your price accordingly, enabling them to benefit from a highly customizable subscription that best matches their business needs. You will also be able to scale down or up their infrastructure based on how they use the product.
If your business is dependent on partners, it is an added benefit that each partner can receive reliable data on the impact of adding a certain client to your customer base. Some partner programs will ask you how much your consumption rose because of adding a particular customer, who came through them. With the dedicated environment approach this can be easily illustrated, whereas with the monolithic approach you can find yourself in a guessing game.
If your business model requires you to start in the enterprise market, you will quickly learn that major corporations do not migrate to SaaS products as quickly as you would want. The dedicated environment approach will give you wind in your sails, as if you have a product that you simply clone, this will enable you to be able to provide enterprise customers with an on-premises version.
Plus, even if some huge firms adopt the SaaS product, the process will require you to certify some versions internally - and that is bound to be a complex and lengthy process.
Next-gen solutions such as Kubeark, which offers highly customizable environments for its customers, open a world of possibilities that include the capability to hyperscale, a faster time to market, access to new distribution channels, and unlimited flexibility in distribution types, supported by increased data privacy for your customers. Book a live customized demo to start hyperscaling your software products.