SaaS for Developers
42 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsLearn what every engineer should know about building and scaling SaaS products from leaders who built world-class SaaS. We will share lessons learned, advice, tips, and great stories. This podcast is part of the SaaS community.
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Episodes
Optimizing Cloud Costs for SaaS Startups
April 04, 2024 18:43 - 29 minutes - 27.1 MBYou can't manage what you don't measure, and this includes your cloud costs. But how detailed should this measurement be? And how will the data translate into impact? I sat down with Adam Shugar, co-founder and CTO of Dashdive, to discuss his approach to cloud costs. He shared his advice, not only on cost cutting but also technology, growing a startup, the importance of community and more.
SaaS: More than just a business model
January 29, 2024 16:00 - 52 minutes - 47.7 MBBill Tarr has the most interesting job in the world. He and his team of SaaS Evangelists at the AWS SaaS Factory work with companies large and small to help them build SaaS on AWS. In this conversation, we discuss the different ways technology and business interact when building SaaS - from cool technical options available only to SaaS companies to the importance of knowing the cost of a tenant. This hour is packed with advice for both the technical and the business side of building a viab...
Building Streaming on S3
January 03, 2024 17:29 - 58 minutes - 53.3 MBRyan Worl, co-founder and CTO of WarpStream, is on a mission to re-engineer fundamental infrastructure on top of S3. Starting with metrics at Uber, continuing with Husky - DataDog's platform for events, logs and everything except metrics and then... Ryan thought "it will be cool to re-build Kafka on S3", reached out to other developers to hear their thoughts... and ended up building WarpStream. In this episode we talk about Ryan's journey, how S3 can fundamentally change the way we design o...
Kora: Cloud Native Platform for Kafka
November 27, 2023 15:07 - 42 minutes - 39.2 MBWe invited Anna Povzner, director of engineering at Confluent, to the show to discuss Kora. Kora is a Cloud Native platform based on Apache Kafka, which her team at Confluent built. Anna and her team recently published a paper about Kora in VLDB 2023, and it won the industry's best paper award. Kora VLDB paper: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol16/p3822-povzner.pdf In our conversation, we discussed: - Capacity abstractions for serverless Kafka - Reconciling design constraints into a cohesive a...
Cell Based Architecture for Early Stage SaaS
November 16, 2023 16:00 - 55 minutes - 50.6 MBIn the last year or two I started hearing a lot about cell-based architectures. Usually in the form of “We had a lot of issues scaling our infrastructure, but then we moved to cell-based architectures” and “I wish I’ve learned about cell based architectures earlier, it would have saved me a lot of pain”. As a result, I’ve wanted to share knowledge about cell-based architectures with this community for a while now. I was lucky that Eno Thereska called me and suggested to do just that! Eno, c...
Building a Serverless Streaming Platform
November 13, 2023 15:45 - 42 minutes - 38.8 MBKrishna Raman has many years of experience building platforms for developers. Now he's applying this experience at Delta Streams to build a serverless platform for stream processing in SQL. In our conversation, we discussed the serverless developer experience, some of the secret sauce behind Delta Stream's Flink Operator, how to deliver a bring-your-own-account SaaS, K8s network policies and why they matter and when you shouldn't use K8s at all.
Never Rewrite! And other advice for SaaS Developers
August 31, 2023 12:00 - 36 minutes - 33.4 MBYou are a founding engineer at a SaaS startup. You built the MVP, and to everyone's great delight - usage is picking up. What's next? In this episode, Jeffrey shares how a messy MVP can gradually evolve into a scalable SaaS product. We discuss the critical design decisions engineers have to make in the early days of building the product: Tabs or spaces, pooled tenants or siloed, Micro-services or monolith... And who makes these decisions. Jeffrey Sherman is a staff engineer, scalability, ...
The Wonders of Postgres Logical Decoding Messages
August 28, 2023 13:00 - 40 minutes - 37.2 MBDid you know that Postgres that lets you write data that you can’t query? Events that will show up in the write-ahead log (WAL) of the database but not in any table. Gunnar Morling, senior staff engineer at Decodable and world expert on change data capture, walks us through data capture basics, this not-new but little-known feature, and dives into three key use cases (my favorite is the audit log) plus a bonus example that goes deeper into Postgres internals. We discuss these blogs and e...
Postgres, Performance and Rails
August 23, 2023 15:30 - 57 minutes - 53.1 MBAndrew Atkinson took a Rails web application that was struggling with load, and optimized it to handle over 9000 HTTP requests per second with an average latency of 35ms end to end. Handling a much higher load, on a smaller RDS instance, with lower latencies. He then shared his expertise by writing a book: "High-Performance Postgres with Rails." Andrew and I discussed Postgres performance, scalability, design patterns, valuable tools, his career, and some Rails. I tackled Andrew with many o...
Trends in Observability and Alerting
August 21, 2023 12:48 - 36 minutes - 33.6 MBEnsuring your production system is well-behaved is table stakes for any SaaS. The space around monitoring and alerting is complex and moving fast, so it is too easy to end up with results that are worse than useless. Alert fatigue is real, and developers must learn to avoid this. Shahar and Tal, founders of Keep and active SaaS Developer community members, joined me to discuss - why observability is so complicated, how alerts fit in, and many best practices for alerting. If you feel like ...
Cloudflare: Performance isolation in multi-tenant DB
August 17, 2023 12:11 - 36 minutes - 33.2 MBCloudflare is no longer "just" a CDN serving 55M HTTP requests/sec; they now offer a wide range of cloud services on the edge. These services run on a data layer with 15 Postgres clusters running hundreds of databases. Vignesh Ravichandran, engineering manager of Cloudflare's database team, joined us to discuss the challenges of running this large-scale multi-tenant environment - dealing with network partitions, noisy neighbors, floods of connections, and even global warming. We talk abo...
Real-time Data Infrastructure - At Uber and Beyond
August 14, 2023 12:07 - 38 minutes - 34.9 MBPinot team at Uber wrote an excellent paper about the real-time analytics platform they built. Chinmay, formerly a principal engineer at Uber and now head of product at StarTree, joined me for a conversation. We discussed the challenges they encountered at Uber, the solutions they came up with, the platform they built, and how to best apply their experience to companies much smaller than Uber. The paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.00087.pdf
Scalable Multi-tenant Platforms at Loom and at Times
August 10, 2023 11:54 - 47 minutes - 43.1 MBShayon wrote a great blog post on the guiding principles he and his team at Loom used to guide them as they evolved Loom's data platform through a period of hypergrowth. I invited Shayon to the show to discuss the challenges he encountered and how he solved them - and I learned that he is now at Tines - solving an entirely new set of challenges with a very different set of solutions. We discuss the fundamental principles that help Shayon make critical decisions when building and scaling hi...
Building SaaS on Kafka Streams
August 07, 2023 12:00 - 53 minutes - 49.3 MBColt McNealy is re-imagining the future of microservices orchestration and he decided to build it entirely on Kafka Streams. In this conversation we discuss how Kafka Streams provides the low latency, reliability, availability and elasticity that is needed for the next generation of microservices orchestration. Colt also shares the most exciting up and coming improvements in Kafka Streams community and the roadmap he'd dictate if he was the benevolent dictator of Kafka Streams.
Transaction Isolation - Demystified!
August 03, 2023 11:30 - 31 minutes - 28.6 MBIf you used a relational database at all, you probably heard of transaction isolation levels. Transaction isolation levels have a massive impact on the behavior of your application - correctness, performance, and error rates. Your database may be distributed these days, so you may have to reason about distributed transactions too. In this video, I explain transaction isolation levels with simple examples and why these levels barely make any sense. I conclude with a few examples of the compl...
Giving and Receiving Actually Useful Advice
July 31, 2023 12:00 - 17 minutes - 15.8 MBYouTube and Twitter are full of “things developers should never do”. There's an endless demand for simple advice that applies in all situations. And that's not a bad thing. If there's a simple solution that works 80% of the time, this is valuable information. More practical than just "it depends." But advice-givers and advice-getters can do better. The best advice doesn't just solve an immediate problem. It tells you when to ignore this advice, and what to do if the problem isn't solved. ...
The Promise of Serverless
July 28, 2023 23:25 - 1 hour - 60.9 MBWhen developers talk about Serverless, they often focus on FaaS. But the best Serverless experience, by far, is delivered by a data store. S3. Why? Because it "just works" and lets developers focus on their code. Serverless databases help you focus on your queries and workload. They abstract the compute. Which also means - usage based pricing. In this video, Ram Subramanian, Nile's CEO, joins us to discuss his vision of the perfect Serverless database experience. We talk about: - What ...
Airtable - Migrating a Multitenant Architecture to MySQL 8.0
March 24, 2023 16:04 - 38 minutes - 35.3 MBThe storage team at Airtable published a blog post describing, in detail, the migration of their petabyte-scale storage layer from MySQL 5.6 to MySQL 8.0. Andrew Wang, the lead of Airtable's storage team, joined us to discuss the migration, Airtable's storage architecture, data isolation levels, engineering culture, and more. The blog: https://medium.com/airtable-eng/migrating-airtable-to-mysql-8-0-809f0398a493 Github's gh-ost, recommended by Andrew: https://github.com/github/gh-ost And...
The Multitenant journey - From 0 to 500M ARR
February 28, 2023 22:19 - 55 minutes - 50.6 MBSaaS applications are multi-tenant, so whether you are writing the first line of code in a new app or worried about scaling your successful SaaS fast enough - you need to be aware of multi-tenant requirements. Isolation, access control, perfornance, operations, scale and compliance In this video, Ram Subramanian, Nile CEO and SaaS Community founder, shares what he learned about building multi-tenant applications, based on 20+ years of experience and 100+ customer conversations. Starting ...
Compute-Storage Separation Explained
January 13, 2023 20:03 - 18 minutes - 16.5 MBGunnar Morling asked a great querstion on Twitter: ""Separating storage and compute" vs. "Predicate push-down" -- I can't quite square these two with each other. Is there a world where they co-exist, or is it just two opposing patterns/trends in DB tech. ?" Those are complimentary patterns and you definitely want them together. They appear contradictory because "separating storage and compute" can mean different things to different people. In this episode, I explain the various meani...
SaaS Developer Trends - 2022 and 2023
December 09, 2022 08:21 - 17 minutes - 15.9 MBThe last SaaS Developer video for 2022! Gwen talks about trends in the SaaS development space, and celebrates the growth of this community. Enjoy the holidays and we'll see you back with more SaaSy content in 2023! https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas
Data Contracts for SaaS Developers with Benn Stancil
November 29, 2022 02:30 - 42 minutes - 39 MBWhen you want to introduce new "Premium" pricing for your SaaS, it may look easy to add a field in the product. But are you sure it won't break the billing system? what about business reports? The last few weeks, my twitter feed was all about data contracts, and it was hard to see the real value behind the hype. Benn Stancil, Chief Analytics Officer at Mode and one of my favorite thought leaders in the data space, agreed to join us and explain what are data contracts and how to use them ...
SLO - Best Practices for Reliable SaaS
October 28, 2022 00:14 - 56 minutes - 52 MBA common challenge for SaaS products that got user adoption is balancing operational investments with a high speed of shipping new features. In the B2B world, moving fast and breaking things isn't an option. We need to move deliberately and reliably. SLO, service level objectives, is a way to align the product requirements for availability with the engineering investment in operations. Ken Finnigan is a senior principal engineer at Workday, where he leads the SLO practice and aligns the...
Shifting Left of API Security
October 11, 2022 17:30 - 49 minutes - 45.2 MBSaaS applications typically have public APIs, and must be concerned with securing these APIs. Buchi Reddy answered many security questions on the SaaS Developer slack community, and we invited him to chat about his approach to API Security and how he sees the future of secure SaaS products. Buchi and Gwen followed up and shared resources on the SaaS Developer Slack - secure container images and opinions on JWT tokens. Join us in the community to continue the discussion: https://launchpas...
Access Control: a customer-centric approach
September 22, 2022 00:20 - 49 minutes - 39.2 MBAccess control is a vast and complex space. Dan Norwood will be our expert guide and take us from first steps all the way to advanced scenarios. We start with overview of the popular approaches, match them with customer requirements, learned how to integrate access control in existing architectures and then explore how a good product design can take access control from "must have" to a delightful customer experience.
My Job is to Predict the Future
July 22, 2022 05:30 - 1 hour - 69 MBSam Ramji is an odd duck. He is full of curiosity, insights and ideas. He is also is the Chief Strategy Officer of Datastax. In the most wide-ranging conversation I've ever recorded, we discussed the most interesting ideas in computing. From the 1980s - all the way to 2032. Along the way you'll learn how to craft a career as an odd duck with talent for strategy, how to transform an organization, how to create a strategy, and you'll hear 3 future predictions and 3 big data trends that are...
Infra SaaS Architecture - the hard parts
July 01, 2022 07:14 - 41 minutes - 38.4 MBIn a recent blog post (https://docs.thenile.dev/blog/saas-is...) we gave a long list of reasons why building a control plane for Infra SaaS is tricky. In this video, we walk through an example - from requirements to design, and illustrate why things are always harder than they first appear.
Building Data Products in 9 Minutes
May 30, 2022 20:47 - 8 minutes - 8.17 MBBuilding Infra SaaS? Love control planes? - Ping me by email: [email protected] or join the community and continue the conversation https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas. Data Products are trendy, and all tech trends lead to a mess around what it even means and how different products fit in. This is a "highlights" version of my YOW! Data 2022 keynote. I included some of the key insights here, and the longer version includes all the details on the data architectures you need for each type o...
Reverse ETL - Why is it a big deal?
May 10, 2022 18:18 - 21 minutes - 19.3 MBReverse ETL is a bit of a buzzword these days. But why? In this video Gwen Shapira discusses the new capabilities that reverse ETL introduces to businesses, and especially B2B SaaS with product-lead growth strategy. She also discusses why reverse ETL is more challenging to implement than you may imagine and why stream processing platforms may be a key part of solving these challenges. Reverse ETL is not for everyone - but after watching this video, you'll know why everyone is talking ab...
SaaS Growth Teams - Hack Your Way to Success
April 08, 2022 17:00 - 30 minutes - 24.3 MBGrowth teams are cross-functional teams that have a clear goal - help customers get value from a SaaS service by improving the product itself. Great growth teams are metrics-driven and obsessed with the user experience. They optimize to experiment, learn and iterate fast. In this episode, I interviewed Laura Brouckman, the engineering leader of Confluent Cloud's growth team - about the value that growth teams bring to the right companies, the team culture that leads to success and the ha...
Elasticity Matters - Designing a Serverless SaaS
April 01, 2022 17:08 - 49 minutes - 45.4 MBThe best cloud experience is a serverless experience. Billing is usage-based, and services scale automatically based on demand - reducing costs and the operational burden for most use-cases. Building a great user experience for serverless platforms is not easy - you need a great architecture and a bit of magic to pull it off. Tune in for API design tips, architecture patterns, and Kubernetes gotchas that the Elasticity team at Confluent Cloud Control Plane learned while building a server...
Speed of Apache Pinot - Cost of Cloud Storage
March 25, 2022 02:11 - 41 minutes - 38 MBCompanies that take existing software and manage it in the cloud have the opportunity to rethink their architecture and use cloud services appropriately. The resulting system is often cheaper, simpler, more elastic, and more manageable. Neha Pawar, a founding engineer at StarTree Data and a PMC member of Apache Pinot, recently published a blog post about her experiments with tiered storage for Pinot. We had an in-depth conversation about how they approached the architecture change and th...
Wix on Wix - Story of Scale, Efficiency and Extreme Dogfooding
March 18, 2022 06:19 - 1 hour - 46.9 MBCan you use your product while you are building it? What is one architecture trick that makes serverless easy? How do you build a call center in two weeks? And what is the right number of managers for a team? I invited Yoav Abrahami, chief architect at Wix, to tell the SaaS Developer Community how Wix uses Wix products to build other Wix products. We've ended up covering a lot of great topics: How large Wix really is The benefits of running on 3 clouds Key insight that allowed Wix to bui...
Get Metering Right - Stories of Usage Based Billing
February 18, 2022 07:50 - 44 minutes - 32.9 MBPuneet and Lior from Amberflo share the story how and why AWS decided to price S3 with usage based billing. We also learn what is metering, how it is different from monitoring and why it matters. And finally, practical tips on how to implement metering and apply a usage-based pricing strategy.
Migrating to Kubernetes - reasons and lessons
February 11, 2022 09:51 - 40 minutes - 73.3 MBMigrating from a simple, working, homegrown orchestration to Kubernetes. Why would you do that? And what will you learn once you do? Gianluca, now engineer at Aerosearch, shares stories from his time at InfluxDB, when they migrated their cloud to K8s. He tells the story, and shares important advice on learning, advocating, making tradeoffs and even the secret to hiring great engineers. Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
SaaS Stories: User Experience for Metrics and Notifications
February 04, 2022 08:25 - 33 minutes - 24.7 MBUsers of Infrastructure SaaS expect to see metrics and receive notifications about the state of the system. But what metrics to expose? Who do you notify? And how to avoid oversharing? This videos are packed with useful tips by Dustin Cote, product manager at Confluent who spent 3 years figuring this out. We start by talking about metrics, and then switch to notifications at around minute 18:00. Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
What is a High Quality Product?
January 28, 2022 08:16 - 18 minutes - 16.9 MBWe know quality when we see it, but what makes a product truly great? And what does it take to build a great product? In this video, Gwen shares her view of what makes products great, gives examples of great products, and shares some tips on how to build one. Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/ Quality links: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0063HC7EQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 C...
SaaS Stories: The road to self-serve provisioning
January 21, 2022 08:12 - 35 minutes - 32.5 MBYou log in to Confluent Cloud, you click on "create cluster" and soon after the cluster shows up, the UI shows a nice message, an email arrives in your mailbox with details about the cluster and the usage of the cluster shows up in your next credit card statement. It is a nice and smooth experience. In this video, our guest, Ram Subramanian, former VP of Eng at Confluent discussed what actually happens behind the scenes and what it took to build this great user experience. This is the...
It is an API Economy and SaaS products can join
January 14, 2022 02:05 - 17 minutes - 16.2 MBAPI Economy is booming and provides many services that make SaaS development easier. Adding great public APIs to your product is also easier than ever. In this episode, Gwen Shapira, usually the host of the channel, shared everything she learned about APIs, API Economy, and building great public APIs in the last week. Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/ Willing to help my product discovery efforts? https://forms.gle/k3Rai3af1BN6D8c2A ...
Why and How of Consumption Based Billing
December 17, 2021 21:18 - 44 minutes - 41.4 MBModern SaaS applications increasingly turn to consumption-based billing - a payment scheme in which customers pay based on resources used. This flexible billing is very popular with users but can be challenging to implement. Metronome CTO, Scott Woody, joined us to explain why usage-based billing is so crucial for the SaaS business model - and what it takes to get it right. Highlights include: - The essential requirements that billing engineers must always support for consumption-based ...
Pricing & Packaging - What the best SaaS companies get right about them? with Adil Aijaz
November 01, 2021 03:34 - 55 minutes - 40 MBIn the three years spanning 2018–2020, at least thirty-nine SaaS companies filed for IPO. These companies are the top 1% of SaaS companies. In this talk, I will cover the common GTM, pricing, and packaging strategies used by these companies, emphasizing developer-focused SaaS IPOs. If you are an entrepreneur or an executive at an early-stage startup (seed - Series B), this talk will be valuable for you. About Adil Aijaz, in his own words: I am a data scientist by education, engineering by ...
SaaS Trends with Eva Nahari
October 29, 2021 00:00 - 24 minutes - 17 MBCustomer expectations in the SaaS world are constantly changing - and the bar for "great customer experience" is getting higher. Eva Nahari, from DNX Ventures, shares her view on what the best SaaS companies do and what everyone else is missing.