Data for SaaS: A new on-demand series and introducing S.C.A.L.E
A new series of on-demand video content is now available to watch on YouTube!
Josh
Amazon Employee
Published Nov 25, 2024
Anyone who has worked with databases in the past has probably encountered the CAP theorem. The CAP theorem states that your distributed database can have any 2 of Consistency, Availability and Partition Tolerance. Relational Databases are traditionally often "CP" forgoing availability and NoSQL databases may be "AP" sacrificing consistency for the sake of availability.
Fast forward a few years and cloud databases make this not quite so black and white. PACELC was introduced to factor in latency and provides 4 possible database configurations.
When building a data architecture (particularly for multi-tenant applications) there are a few more considerations that go into your decision around which data store(s) to pick and how to configure those data stores.
We put together a loose framework to guide this decision called "S.C.A.L.E".
S.C.A.L.E stands for Scalability, Consistency, Availability, Latency and Evolution and exists as a rubric to decide which data technologies to adopt for your applications requirements:
| Tenet | Questions |
|---|---|
| S = Scalability | “Are you able to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes.” |
| C = Consistency | “How do you know that your data changes have been made successfully, and will persist”? |
| A = Availability | “The ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service failures, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfiguration or transient network issues.” |
| L = Latency | “Are your tenants happy (in terms of performance). How do you know? If not, what can you do about it? |
| E = Evolution | “Will your SaaS application survive the journey from Client/Server through APIs, Microservices to the future”? |
Based on the tenets of this framework, we're pleased to share a new series of on-demand videos available discussing some of the key concepts around building data architectures for SaaS applications on AWS.
Check out the first 4 here on YouTube (and be sure to subscribe so you know when the next batch get added!).
The first 4 episodes cover:
Episode 1: Introduction - Grant walks us through S.C.A.L.E and what to expect from the series
Episode 2: Scaling relational databases for SaaS - I take a dive into the vertical and horizontal scaling strategies for relational databases
Episode 3 - Why Consistency matters in relational databases - Venkatesh explores the concept of consistency and how this translates into modern data architectures
Episode 4 - Tenant backup and restore - Extracting individual tenants for backup and restore purposes is a common ask of SaaS applications. Dave shows us how!
I hope you enjoy the first 4 episodes. Please let us know what topics you'd like to see next and be sure to subscribe to hear about the next 4 soon!
Any opinions in this post are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.