5 Best Practices for SaaS Businesses: Deploying DevOps as Your Secret Weapon

With immense competition in the enterprise landscape to operate at maximum efficiency and get more done than ever before, many SaaS businesses are choosing AWS to build, scale, and deliver their services. AWS offers a reliable and secure foundation for building and delivering SaaS solutions. Leveraging AWS, Mission helps SaaS businesses create a personalized DevOps environment for creating the best solutions possible. This includes following the five best practices listed below, which are crucial for SaaS companies to maintain a competitive advantage and stay ahead of the game.

Create a Continuous Integration Process

Continuous integration allows you to build, test, and deploy your code in multiple environments. Developers don’t have to worry when making changes, as feedback is rapid and problems are easily identified when they arise. Changes don’t deploy until they are built and tested in a repeatable fashion. This early step in a CI/CD pipeline helps identify issues quickly and should be the first step that every SaaS startup should take.

Use a Continuous Integration Server

Deploying a continuous integration server lets developers put code through multiple environments and tests. This ensures stability across a variety of systems and increases confidence when deploying to production, allowing for faster product releases and updates.

Establish a Continuous Deployment (CD) Process

As a SaaS start-up, you want to systematically spin up a new environment or collection of servers and deploy code onto them for development, testing or production release. Software should be continuously ready for deployment. Think of this as the button-pushing process: When you have a new feature, the infrastructure is deployed, and the code is already written, ready and waiting to be launched.

Have a CI/CD Pipeline in Use

A CI/CD pipeline helps you deliver features and fixes to your customers as soon as possible. This strategy starts with building your application or feature, integrating it, and deploying it. This multi-step process ultimately works to prevents errors that might impact your users before they ever get deployed. If something slips through the process, the source will be easily identifiable, so you can fix it faster for redeployment.

Introduce Automated Testing into your CI/CD Pipeline

This is an important aspect of your CI/CD process that cannot be bypassed if you want to stand out amongst your SaaS competition. Legacy testing methods often slow the pipeline to a crawl and developers often see these methods as a roadblocks to continuous delivery. Automated testing allows you to get features in front of customers faster, with higher quality and greater security.

Implementation

Getting new features in front of your customers quickly increases your solution’s reputation and ultimately drives new customers. This is why it is especially important for SaaS start-ups to partner with an expert DevOps team. The faster you’re able to transform an idea or customer request into a feature of your application, the faster you’ll be able to determine that feature’s business value.

Implementing DevOps and CI/CD may seem like a major project to undertake, especially when your priorities should be focused on your SaaS product. However, CI/CD helps revolutionize the way you build and deploy your solutions. With Mission’s Managed DevOps, you can build the perfect pipeline for your needs. Mission’s AWS certified engineers provide ongoing services if you ever want to make changes or add new features. Mission’s Managed DevOps enables your team to focus on building the best SaaS solution possible without distraction. Learn more about what Mission can do for your company here.

FAQ

1. How can small SaaS startups with limited resources effectively implement these DevOps best practices without a large, dedicated DevOps team?

For small SaaS startups looking to implement DevOps best practices with limited resources, focusing on automation, continuous integration, and delivery (CI/CD), and leveraging cloud services can be highly effective. By prioritizing these areas, even a small team can achieve significant improvements in efficiency, scalability, and deployment speed, making the most of their resources. Mission Cloud works with companies of all sizes to provide Managed DevOps. Learn more about our DevOps services here.

1. What specific metrics or indicators should SaaS companies monitor to evaluate the effectiveness of their DevOps practices?

To evaluate the effectiveness of DevOps practices, SaaS companies should monitor metrics that reflect operational efficiency, product quality, and customer satisfaction. Key indicators include deployment frequency, change failure rate, time to restore service, and lead time for changes. These metrics can provide insights into the impact of DevOps on the business's ability to innovate and respond to market demands.

1. How do these DevOps best practices align with regulatory and compliance requirements, particularly in heavily regulated industries like healthcare and finance?
2. Aligning DevOps practices with regulatory and compliance requirements involves implementing robust security measures, ensuring data protection, and maintaining clear documentation of processes and controls. For industries such as healthcare and finance, this may mean incorporating specific compliance measures into the DevOps pipeline, such as automated compliance checks and secure coding practices, to ensure that software releases meet regulatory standards.