6 Critical SaaS Engineering Mistakes to Avoid
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| Log management as a service Simplified Log Management Six Critical SaaS Engineering Mistakes to Avoid Manoj Chaudhary CTO & VP of Engineering April 2014
description
My most important lesson from working on 7+ cloud-based products: “Failing to prepare for failure is costly... but failing to prepare for success can be even worse”. Learn from my experience - read this deck to learn the top 6 SaaS mistakes you should avoid.
Transcript of 6 Critical SaaS Engineering Mistakes to Avoid
| Log management as a service Simplified Log Management
Six Critical SaaS Engineering Mistakes to Avoid Manoj Chaudhary CTO & VP of Engineering April 2014
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My SaaS Engineering Background
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World’s most popular cloud-based log management service
What Loggly Does
§ >5,000 customers
§ Near real-time indexing of events
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“Failing to prepare for failure is costly… but failing to prepare for success can be even worse.”
My Most Important Lesson from 7+
Cloud-based Products
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“Adoption for our offering will take time, so we can get some experience before we think about how to scale.”
Mistake #1
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You never really know what your own service’s adoption curve will look like.
Reality #1
Credit gkofiannan.
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§ Treat scalability as a P1 feature for launch § Set realistic adoption goals and scenarios
§ Translate into:
§ Performance testing § Stress testing § Longevity testing § Capacity plans
§ Build service components for horizontal scalability
Avoiding Mistake #1
Scalability should never be the bottleneck for your service adoption and success. The potential damage is too great.
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“Our customers will follow predictable behavior patterns.”
Mistake #2
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Reality #2 Be ready for something unexpected that will threaten to break your service. (That might be when your customer needs you most.)
Loggly Problem: “Noisy Neighbors” with Spikes in Log Volumes
• Application on fire • Log management configuration problem • Other human error • Spikes can last a long time
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§ Have processes for managing out-of-policy activity
§ Set up metrics and alerts that let you know about unexpected behavior before it sparks a fire
Avoiding Mistake #2
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“Governance is Marketing’s problem.”
Mistake #2
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If it affects the customer experience of your service, it’s Engineering’s problem too.
Reality #3
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Build a governor that sits on top of platform and “watches” what’s going on – across tenants
Avoiding Mistake #3 SaaS Engineering = Developing service, running service, and governing service
Identify out-of-policy behavior
Segregate misbehavior to
eliminate impact on other customers
Inform the right people
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“We don’t need operations automation.”
Mistake #4
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SaaS Operations team needs to be much more than sysadmin.
Reality #4
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Avoiding Mistake #4 End-to-end automation, from deployment to ongoing monitoring.
Alerts to DevOps when set thresholds
exceeded
Monitoring KPIs on
individual process
performance
One-click capacity addition
One-click deployment
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“We don’t need to build an immutable store.”
Mistake #5
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Data corruption happens. Reality #5
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Avoiding Mistake #5 Maintain a separate store of clean, unmodified customer data.
Recover
Re-process
Data coruption
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“Operational metrics are optional; let’s just build them after we get the product out the door.”
Mistake #6
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You have to see issues coming, or your first misstep could be your last.
Reality #6
“Did not use it” “No need at the moment” “Too expensive”
“Do not use” “Did not use it yet” “Not enough return on investment”
“Not using the product”
“Not meeting my needs” “It wasn’t the right fit for me”
“Not what I currently need”
“Never used it – just signed up for free trial to check it out”
“Did not use”
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Avoiding Mistake #6 Instrument your application to measure every key process and track the application’s health on operational dashboards.
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Log Management is Our Full-Time Job. It Shouldn’t Be Yours.
About Us: Loggly is the world’s most popular cloud-based log management solution, used by more than 5,000 happy customers to effortlessly spot problems in real-time, easily pinpoint root causes and resolve issues faster to ensure application success.
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