Unleashing your Applications True Potential with the power of SaaS
A Deeper Look into the SaaS Control Plane
Published Jul 23, 2024
Last Modified Sep 2, 2024
By: Bill Tarr (AWS SaaS Factory) & Kamal Gupta (CEO & Founder, Omnistrate)
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, businesses are increasingly turning to Software as a Service (SaaS) to streamline operations, reduce costs, and drive innovation. In this blog, we explore SaaS Control Planes, their importance, and why they are challenging to build. We'll also explore why companies should adopt SaaS and invite you to a special event in San Francisco where we'll dive deeper into these topics.
A Modern SaaS application is composed of two “Planes”
Application Plane: Focuses on delivering the core functionalities and user experience of the application.
Control Plane: Focuses on managing and orchestrating the operational aspects of the entire service to ensure the application runs effectively.
While the purpose of this blog is to dive deeper into SaaS Control planes, it is important to set the stage by contrasting the role of the Control Plane, with that of the Application Plane. While these planes share the same end goal, delivering an amazing end-user experience, each plane has its own focus and realm of responsibility.
- Application Plane: Responsible for application interaction with the end-users, providing the interfaces and services that end-users use daily.
- Control Plane: Responsible for managing, configuring, and monitoring the application and its underlying infrastructure
- Application Plane: Includes business logic, data processing, and user interaction mechanisms.
- Control Plane: Includes managing tenants, application deployments, infrastructure management, delivering updates, providing visibility, tracking usage, monitoring, billing, security and compliance mechanisms.
The SaaS Control Plane is the backbone of a SaaS application. It is responsible for managing the orchestration, configuration, and operational aspects of the Application Plane. Essentially, it provides a unified interface (a Mission Control) for monitoring and controlling the entire environment.
We build SaaS to improve how we operate software. We want to be more agile, deliver innovation and features to our customers more rapidly, and we want to do it efficiently - both from an operational and a cost perspective. The ultimate goal of all these improvements is to drive growth… profitable growth.
Achieving the promise of SaaS is not simply a matter of calling your application SaaS and deploying it to your tenants. Profitable growth requires tools that align with all the other improvements we want to achieve. We need tools that enable tenants to quickly gain value from your SaaS solution when they decide to onboard, that provide your team centralized management tools, and provide operational insight into your tenants experience, the health of your infrastructure, and most importantly the health of your SaaS business.
The purpose of these tools includes:
- Centralized Management: provide a centralized interface for managing various aspects of the SaaS application including deployments, infrastructure, configuration, monitoring.
- Automation and Orchestration: automate repetitive and complex tasks such as scaling, billing, updates, recovery, and backups.
- Efficiency: automate routine tasks and centralize control, reducing the operational overhead and complexity of managing a SaaS application.
- Security and Compliance: enhances security by centralizing user access control and enforcing consistent security policies across all tenants.
- Tenant management: allows for tenant-specific customization, making it possible to offer personalized experiences to different customers within the same application framework.
- Operational Insight: provides valuable insights into the application’s performance and usage patterns, aiding in informed decision-making and proactive management.
- Tenancy Management: Managing multiple tenants in a secure, scalable and reliable way is inherently complex. Each tenant requires tenant isolation, customized configurations, and efficient resource allocation. Ensuring that each tenant experiences the application as if it were dedicated to them—without impacting others—requires sophisticated design and robust architecture.
- Scalability: Typically, SaaS applications require thousands of SaaS configurations to cater to different customer needs. Building a control plane that can adapt and iterate quickly to cater to different needs of the customer base is usually one of the core challenges.
- Ensuring High Availability and Reliability: A SaaS application must be available and reliable 24/7. The Control Plane is responsible for maintaining high availability and fault tolerance. This involves setting up comprehensive monitoring, providing real-time insights and alerts and, implementing strategies for redundancy, failover, and disaster recovery, all while ensuring minimal downtime and seamless user experiences.
- Security and Compliance: The Control Plane must enforce security controls for data isolation between tenants to prevent data breaches or unauthorized access. Additionally, it must ensure compliance with various industry standards and regulations, which can vary significantly between different regions and sectors.
- Efficiency: As the number of tenants and the volume of data grows, the control plane must efficiently manage and scale resources. Dynamically allocating resources based on tenant demand without causing bottlenecks or over-provisioning requires sophisticated algorithms and monitoring tools. Moreover, automating maintenance tasks involves creating and managing complex workflows. Ensuring these processes run smoothly without manual intervention is critical.
- Integration with Third-Party Services: Integrating the control plane with various third-party services, like observability, billing and marketplace listings, alerting, identity, continuous integration, cloud insurance and other management systems can be challenging. Ensuring these integrations work smoothly and securely within the Control Plane adds another layer of complexity. Each integration must be carefully managed to prevent disruptions and maintain the integrity of the overall system.
Despite these challenges, having an effective SaaS Control Plane is crucial for the success of any SaaS application. It provides the foundation for scalability, security, and efficiency, enabling businesses to deliver high-quality services to their customers. By addressing these challenges head-on, companies can create robust and reliable SaaS solutions that meet the needs of their users and stand out in a competitive market.
AWS offers key building blocks from infrastructure, security, billing and cost management, to a comprehensive suite of services that make it an ideal choice for building SaaS applications. Its global reach, continuous innovation, and robust support system empower companies to deliver high-quality SaaS solutions to their customers. Omnistrate leverages AWS foundation to provide a developer platform to make it easy for others to build and operate their SaaS on top of AWS. By trusting AWS, businesses can focus on developing their applications and achieving their strategic goals while leveraging the best-in-class infrastructure and services provided by AWS.
While some companies may consider building their own Control Plane,(and for those companies AWS & the AWS SaaS Factory team are here to help), leveraging a specialized SaaS Control Plane provider like Omnistrate offers numerous advantages over building your own.
“Our friends at another company told us it took them 2 years to build their control plane using Vanilla AWS APIs. Omnistrate enabled us to ship our Cloud platform in only two weeks, and after Omnistrate, we saw a 200% increase in active users.” - Subomi Oluwalana CEO, Convoy
1. Time to Value
Building a SaaS Control Plane from scratch is a time-consuming process that requires extensive resources and expertise. By leveraging Omnistrate, companies can drastically reduce their time to market. Omnistrate provides a ready-to-use, robust Control Plane that allows businesses to focus on developing and enhancing their core applications rather than getting bogged down by infrastructure concerns.
2. Cost Efficiency
Developing and maintaining an in-house Control Plane is a significant financial investment. It involves costs related to hiring specialized personnel, ongoing development, infrastructure, and operational management. Omnistrate offers a cost-effective alternative by providing a scalable service that eliminates the need for substantial upfront investments and reduces ongoing operational expenses.
3. Expertise and Reliability
Omnistrate is built by experts who specialize in SaaS Control Planes. This means companies benefit from cutting-edge technology and best practices that have been refined and optimized. Omnistrate’s expertise ensures high reliability, security, and performance, which might be challenging to achieve with an in-house solution without extensive experience and continuous investment.
4. Continuous Innovation
The technology landscape is continuously evolving, with new challenges and opportunities emerging regularly. Omnistrate is committed to continuous improvement and innovation, ensuring that their Control Plane service stays ahead of the curve. By leveraging Omnistrate, companies can benefit from the latest advancements and features without having to invest in ongoing R&D themselves.
5. Focus on Core Business
By outsourcing the Control Plane to Omnistrate, companies can focus their resources and attention on their core business and product development. This allows for better allocation of internal resources towards innovation and customer-centric improvements, driving business growth and competitive advantage.
Leveraging Omnistrate for their SaaS Control Plane provides companies with a faster, cost-effective, and reliable solution compared to building their own. With Omnistrate’s expertise, scalability, security, and continuous innovation, businesses can ensure their SaaS applications are robust, efficient, and future-proof, allowing them to focus on delivering value to their customers and achieving their strategic goals.
Any opinions in this post are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.