As SaaS is gaining more popularity, building a SaaS product now has a lot of scope in the market. But the process, sadly, is not a cakewalk. Even successful products are ever evolving as customers demand more features. Companies with traditional software are rethinking how to transform their business to leverage the power of SaaS. Big enterprises have multiple products and software applications with thousands of users.
Building and maintaining products:
CTOs have to stay ahead of competition by bringing in new features by gauging market and user demands. Let’s take a scenario wherein a CTO hires new developers to augment the exiting development teams. There may be more than hundred existing developers maintaining a monster code base. Now imagine this – a new developer just pushes a code and the core functionality is broken because a developer forgot to do an elementary null check and did not cover his code through a simple JUnit test case. The build process by itself takes around 2 hours and if you restart the server another hour goes waste. In sum, the developer productivity will be very less.
Such scenarios can be day to day occurrences in agile development process. What if it happens in production? In monoliths such events can bring down a product to its knees, leaving users to face downtime with application crashes. If are still using monolithic architecture your product is more likely to fail in such instances.
This is where transition from legacy architecture to microserve based architecture can benefit the stakeholders as well as users.
How smart CTOs can transform legacy applications:
To give an analogy microservice architecture is just like diversifying your financial portfolio. Imagine if you have a million dollars instead of investing all million dollars in one stock or one asset class you just diversify it to different asset classes and reduce your risk profile. Microservice is Agile friendly, release friendly and going to production is very easy because any issues need not bring the enterprise down. Failures are local and product teams can easily identify the frequent problem areas and address the problems. Build times are less, deployment times are less.
Microservice is not a silver bullet, they slow down overall performance due to inter process communications between different services. Some services like user authentication and security are global and all services will be called frequently. A sound architecture will be able to handle the extra load.
Other benefits of microservice:
When building a scalable and serviceable software application, it is wise to select an architecture wherein the services and functions are independent. It’s one of the driving factors why CTOs are changing from monolith to microservices based architecture. It is the right step when upgrading SaaS products or applications.
With microservices a complex application becomes blocks of multiple autonomous units that can be deployed, updated, and managed individually. For enterprise applications it provides following advantages:
1.Converged Business Functionality:
The usage of microservices eradicates the requirement to design basic functionality that is used in the organization for multiple purposes. By developing business services that assist various applications as microservices, it becomes easier to manage smaller units compared to complex apps.
2. Improved Resilience
Since the apps have various services functioning to serve the need, they communicate via defined interfaces. So, when one service isn’t available due to technical issues, another one substitutes to take over instantly. This improved fault-detection helps in retaining larger applications when a small unit fails to function.
3. Data Presentation Flexibility
As the data extraction process simplifies for multiple end-users, microservices enables developers to design the data presentation easily.
4. Easy Maintenance
This benefit is the most common one when using microservices. It enables segregation of complex apps, making them easier to manage and deploy. Each service can be managed and operated by different teams, since every service stands for different processes. It provides a self- sufficient approach, where every service works in a different environment and is used for different processes as well.
Conclusion:
Product development is an elaborate and never ending process. There are so many intrinsic details that product teams need to look into when developing and maintaining SaaS products. product teams need to be mindful at every single step because a small glitch can affect the whole product.
Without the right strategy in product enhancement, your product might go unnoticed, amongst the competition.
This is why microservices and event-driven architecture one of the preferred methods by CTOs and our software specialists and architects to build and upgrade a product.