Automating SaaS Operations

"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency" - Bill Gates

This is an article which I posted at the Nolio blog site as a guest blogger back in 2009. Not only is is relevant today, but perhaps even more so...

The Next Killer App
If I had a great idea for the next killer app (I have, actually) and if I had unlimited funds (I don’t, actually) I would have built the software as an on-demand offering.

I would have spent half my funds on building the operational support systems – provisioning, billing, retention policy, self-service, report generator, etc. The other half would be invested in building instrumentation, redundancy, automation, integration, application level monitoring, silent upgrades, customer notifications, and so on.

The rest of the money (you may wonder about my math, but hey, I’ve got unlimited funds) would go towards building the actual application.

Most SaaS vendors out there (and they are growing fast) have chosen the predictable path of building the application first, and worrying about serviceability later. This is the fastest way of getting to market with low costs. The next step is choosing some viable hosting solution and off we go, offering the world our ever better CRM.

Growth
Many months and dozens of customers later, reality hits with all the issues of servicing the software, rapid growth and dealing with labor intensive tasks that are the humdrum of daily life in a SaaS operation. Provisioning/de-provisioning, configuration changes, customized reports, and the most dreaded – upgrades, task the team as a whole, especially when the product is successful and the number of customers is growing daily.

It is not that SaaS executives, architects and engineers are lacking in any way. On the contrary, they are mostly smart, inventive, and creative and have a deep understanding of their customers’ needs in the specific domain. The problem is that they are product people, not service people. Practically none of them come from IT and cannot envision the life of a service operations engineer.

At this point, automation becomes crucial to the survival of the business.

Whether it is built into the next version (many architectures make this quite difficult) or done externally, automation is needed to reduce costs, physical labor, frustration and mainly, error-prone manual procedures. Repeatability, which is a derivative of automation, is also crucial.

Automation is needed across the board. Be it in setting up a new server, or building a new application instance. It could be a manual procedure regarding provisioning of application resources, or building a seamless upgrade procedure.

Outages happen. How quickly can you recover from a service disruption and ensure that the recovery does not create it own problems? Automation not only provides the routines for quick recovery, but instills a discipline of thinking out the necessary steps, discovering dependencies and planning ahead. An added benefit of automation is that it documents the process so you can go back and review the best and worst of your procedures.

In my next post I will take a closer look at the SaaS Upgrade Nightmare.