SaaS Software Development Best Practices

• By Aslam Hasan Khan
• 04-10-2022
• Software

SaaS software development has become an art in today's ever-evolving tech world. It requires its fair share of never-ending learning, upgradation, and application development to build a market-differentiated and compelling software for today's customers. Spotting the light on the fact that SaaS products are the main source of driving customers.

Before heading forward in the article, let's take a brief on understanding what SaaS software development is.

What is SaaS software development?
Software as a service or SaaS is not like regular software which requires the installation and updating rather it is already installed and configured.

SaaS software is directly hosted in a SaaS provider’s data center or cloud, and the payment is done on the basis of a subscription when a client uses their software. Most of the SaaS software is available on the internet.

Best practices for developing SaaS application

Here are some of the common SaaSs software development best practices:

1. Work on the suitable architecture of SaaS

This is rather a popular opinion that a monolithic architecture is supposed to be among the best solutions available for SaaS software development. On the other hand, monolithic architecture has some major faults. Since it has a large codebase, that is accessed by all developers during the time of upgradation or to run any changes.

Due to this, it requires for the developers to alter in the whole stack at once. In that case, if your SaaS software setup has monolith architecture, a layered architecture is necessary. This suggests that the monolith possesses layers, hence this can be changed with an ease.

On the other hand, others like to believe that microservices architecture are by far the best choice for SaaS applications. Much smaller independent units combine together to form microservice architecture.

These microservices facilitate every application process as a whole other service. This results in such services having their separately owned logic and database and each of them performs a unique function.

In order to work through more complex solutions, microservices come to the rescue since they incorporate in creating teams that work independently on the different features of a similar solution. Despite the fact that microservice architecture is rather difficult to manage, but also it does provide various advantages too.

Your approach to the SaaS development team must require a source of strong solution architecture that will be able to make better decisions, especially concerning what architecture will be better for you as per your need.

2. Hire a compliance expert to conduct the security audit
Any SaaS development approach relies upon its ability to enhance security for your service. Considering the fact that your SaaS is not built around complying with the security regulations in certain countries, it can get banned!

Hence this is a huge problem that one deal with when developing SaaS for oneself. Different countries have a different set of regulations when it comes to security. So hiring a compliance expert is the need of time because he will conduct regular checks on the market and will conclude the kind of compliances you must inculcate in order to flourish your business.

For example, GDPR is essential when you decide to deal in the European market. If your SaaS is not built to comply with it, then you will not be able to operate in that region.

3. Integration of all features in the early development stage (CI/CD)
With the aid of CI/CD, coders will be able to club development and operations activities that would enforce automation in the field of building, testing, and deploying applications.

The new and more advanced DevOps practices constitute a series of development, continuous testing, integrations, deployment, and series of monitoring of the software all through its development cycle. Therefore, the CI/CD will serve as a backbone of the DevOps operations.

4. Using content delivery networks (CDN)
Showing up on time is the ultimate key to creating successful SaaS products. The approach of content delivery networks (CDN) is used by some of the popular SaaS developing companies such as N-iX in order to tackle is this issue.

If you're looking to present your SaaS approach on a worldwide level, then using CDN is a necessary tool. Now let’s look at the example of CloudFront from Amazon as an illustration here.

Imagine if your US-based website has videos on it. The customers that are operating the website who are located in the US will not experience the issue hence the experience will be a smooth one. But, when you decide to expand your business to different countries, say for example Germany.

Your German users will have to process a request before watching the video uploaded on your US-based website without the support of CloudFront.

Ultimately this results in huge time waste. When you have the support of the CloudFront then the video cache when operated in Germany, will be easily accessed without any latency.

Therefore, with the aid of a content delivery network, your SaaS operates the best when you take your business worldwide.

AWS also tends to provide a service that is called as Lambda@Edge that is popularly used with CloudFront. So this service basically runs the codes on the closest server, hence canceling out latency.

Challenges in SaaS software development:

Now, let’s discuss the key challenges ing SaaS software.

1. Security

When software is available online, keeping security intact is a major issue. Developers may have to keep a keen watch on the software development so as to avoid the problems like data leaks, and unknown attacks on the users along with complying with international security standards.

In order to tackle this, security tools like cloud access security brokers (CASB), cloud workload protection (CWP), and cloud security posture management (CSPM) facilitate the protection of data, provide storage and managed workload from getting exposed to attackers across all the channels of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS.

2. Third-party payment integration

Most often payment is done via system integration by the means of a third-party payment service. To establish this, there are two main payment methods, one is supposed to be an easy way and another way is rather an demanding one.

The first option is opting for the payment service that provides an excellent support for the integration. The second one is that the developers are supposed to check out the technical aspects and the existing challenges that go behind a payment interaction.

3. Zero-downtime deployment

One of the main priorities for SaaS software is its availability. When the software updates to a new version and the system might not be available for the users to access. In order to tackle this situation, the developers could opt for a zero-downtime deployment strategy.

This translates to enabling a fully responsive initiative that would run down the entire updating time period.

4. Safe and well-defined database access that is GDPR compliant

Since GDPR rules and regulations are grabbing the world by the throat. Feeling secure while using the internet is also a necessity for each one of us. Now that everyone is on the internet, hackers are all over the place.

In order to implement better security, regular audits must go on while creating every unit to analyze if there is any fault that must be taken care of.

5. Managing SaaS subscription lifecycle

One of the best ways of managing SaaS plans and subscriptions is to develop a ready solution beforehand. Most often the solution can be created with a payment service as in the case of the stripe.

This is considered to be one of the easy-to-use approaches that are able to take care of two things at the same time, payments and exposing the API that is used in the SaaS system.

Final Words

The SaaS approach brings out a huge list of advantages that helps you build your business from scratch and also help you widen your horizon marching all over the world.

Hence, deciding on a step-by-step strategy to build SaaS products is essential before you plan on investing too much.
If it is developed effectively, SaaS will be going to take your business to great heights.