“SaaS” – once such a disputed topic, has now been widely accepted. The increase in the adoption as well as the new technology innovations such as cloud has significantly helped in the evolution of SaaS architecture. In this blog I have tried to take a look back and see what constituted SaaS architecture then and what constitutes now.
| Topic | Past Approaches | Present Approaches |
| Infrastructure Security | Security Policies | Offered By Cloud |
| Security Audits | ||
| Firewall | ||
| Anti-spam | ||
| SSL | ||
| Application Security | Form based authentication | SSO with AD/ OpenID Connect/ WS-Federation |
| Role based Control | Multifactor authentication | |
| Claim based identity | ||
| Granular privileges | ||
| Row and Field level privileges | ||
| Tenant based ACL | ||
| OAuth based access | ||
| User Audits and Event Audits | ||
| Transactional change audit and Analysis | ||
| OWASP Standards | ||
| Scalability | Load balanced Webservers | Elasticity |
| Sharded database | ||
| Asynchronous operations | ||
| Cloudwatch/Azurewatch | ||
| NoSql database | ||
| Distributed Caching | ||
| Availability | DB Replication and Failover | Multi availability zone database failover |
| Multi availability zone application failover | ||
| Performance | 5-10 seconds | Subsecond |
| Integration | Excel Import | Rest services |
| Excel Export | Web Hooks | |
| Configurability | Custom code | Configurable Workflow |
| White Labelling | Configurable UI | |
| Configurable Logos and Themes | ||
| Configurable Forms and Grids | ||
| User Interface | Html and CSS | HTML5.0 |
| Flash/Applet/Silverlight | SPA | |
| Javascript frameworks | ||
| Realtime updates | ||
| Responsive Design | ||
| CSS Framework | ||
| Native Apps | ||
| Analytics | BI | Big Data |
| Manageability | ‘N’ layered architecture | Dependency Injection |
| Exception logging | AOP based instrumentation | |
| Cloud log management service | ||
| MVC/MVVM | ||
| Tenancy | ASP Model | Multi tenant Architecture |
| Single Tenant | Tenant Hierarchy | |
| Support for reseller management | ||
| Customer Service | Implementation and Operations Team | Self service |
| Deployment | Self-Hosting | Virtualization |
| MSP | Public Cloud | |
| Private Cloud | ||
| Hybrid | ||
| Management | Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) | SaaS Lifecycle Management (SLCM) |
SaaS architectures have grown leaps and bounds in the last decade. Today SaaS space is flooded with numerous options for SaaS application development. More importantly people have started taking an unified approach that can tie all the above pieces together.
Let us wait and watch where this goes in the future.
TECHNOLOGY DIRECTOR, SAAS & CLOUD PRACTICE at ASPIRE SYSTEMS
Janaki has consulted a wide range of organizations across several verticals, and has worked with some of the mission critical SaaS applications. Janaki has worked with more than 40+ SaaS companies in defining their SaaS and Cloud strategy. Janaki’s broad experience in delivering several SaaS solutions helps him in playing product management role in Techcello framework. Janaki is an ardent cloud enthusiast and a prolific speaker at SaaS University & Cloud Connect Events.
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