Should I take my application to SaaS? That’s a question most software vendors have asked themselves, as they should. Why? You may wonder. Quite simply, the SaaS (Software as a Service) business model offers a win/win situation and perfect alignment between customers and businesses.
If we start looking at the business side, it has been observed that typical SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses tend to grow faster, generate more recurring revenue and have higher valuations than product sale companies.
Given their business model, SaaS businesses are also more resilient in the face of crises. While most companies took a hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, SaaS businesses have experienced an acceleration or limited impact to their subscription growth rates.
For customers, it is all about user experience. It not only offers convenience and reduced investments, but also simplifies software upgrades, access to new features and cutting-edge technologies.
Therefore, like the 15,529 other SaaS companies in the world, CHILI publish took the plunge and decided to take its app through the intricate and exciting saasification journey.
Key Challenges
CHILI publish expressed the will to transform its entire software business. That implied changing its software offering from an on-premises deployment model to offering it as a service in a SaaS model, reworking entirely how technology was delivered.
Positive Thinking Company supported the team in the construction of a solid foundation for their new SaaS business success by understanding, preparing and executing the transition.
Our role was to:
- Define the architecture on Microsoft Azure together with CHILI product engineers
- Implement the solution using DevSecOps best practices
- Provide 24/7 support
Our Approach
The original application architecture was not designed for a SaaS offering, therefore a new viable solution had to be developed.
To solve these constraints, we:
- Deployed the application as a stateful application on an AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) using custom metrics for scaling
- Provided guidance in refactoring certain parts of the software to make it cloud ready
- Optimized it for cloud in terms of costs, automated deployments and management efficiency
Our Cloud experts designed a container-based infrastructure for simpler scaling, better infrastructure management, and optimized resource usage. We used Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) — a fully managed service in Azure – a public cloud computing service that allows to deploy and run a Kubernetes cluster in Azure without the overhead of managing the control plane, as it is fully hosted in Azure. Only the K8s worker nodes needed to be managed. AKS appeared as the best option for deploying a cloud-ready and microservice-based cloud-native application as it also supported the containerization of monolithic applications.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) include a lot of features which help us in terms of scalability, performance, security, governance etc., during containers deployment and management. The major features are the following:
After understanding how the application worked and grasping the different project’s requirements, we started designing the infrastructure architecture around AKS and wrote the Terraform configuration (Infrastructure as Code, IaC) for that. We deployed the first cluster that allowed us to perform the first tests and validate the PoC. After running several performance tests, we were able to find the best sizing for our cluster’s nodes and containers, as well as the best option for storage.
We work with CHILI publish continuously to improve our monitoring and alerting, security, backup & recovery, CI/CD integration, performance and scalability.
“We needed a partner that would provide a qualitative, timely, and reliable delivery. PTC meticulously assessed our setup, objectives and requirements and translated this into a roadmap that worked for all partners involved. Accurate, precise, and on schedule.”
– Frank Maes, VP Delivery @ CHILI publish
Benefits
CHILI publish was able to start with SaaS very fast, knowing some compromises needed to be made until certain architectural code changes were done.
From a technical point of view the new multi-tenant architecture allowed CHILI publish to reduce the cost of development investment, maintenance and support.
The automated deployment using Terraform and TeamCity made release cycles a lot shorter, while the automatic scaling allowed for greater uptime and more availability.
Developers can work faster since they operate in a controlled infrastructure environment. Contrary to the past, where every customer had its own infrastructure.
“There is also a significant impact on how we operate as a customer-first business. Having different customers running on different infrastructures, tends to complicate providing fast support and guidance 24/7. We can now support our cloud customers much faster.”
– Frank Maes, VP Delivery @ CHILI publish
Overall, this transformation from SaaP to SaaS was an obvious win for CHILI publish. They gained a more stable revenue stream in the form of subscriptions and enabled the development team to spend more time in carrying out development efforts that keep their users happy and on board.
“So far, we have moved 40% of our business into the cloud. We anticipate a 250% increase of cloud business alone this year. Our customers are revving up for growth and scaling. Our SaaS offering enables them to do just that and allows us to be just as flexible as they are.”
– Kevin Goeminne, CEO @ CHILI publish
Want to go SaaS?
Do you want to start planning your application(s) SaaS transformation? Get in touch with our SaaS experts to guide you through the process.
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