Create a robust and fault-tolerant SaaS system
Even if you have a great idea about your SaaS and you manage to complete the entire development.
But suppose your infrastructure or code cannot handle a large number of users on the platform and it keeps crashing or your database gets compromised every time by some hackers. In that case, it’s not a successful SaaS business and you will keep losing your customers and spend endless money doing the marketing and fixing the bugs.
Let’s have a look into how we can avoid this endless cycle and build a strong robust and fault-tolerant system for your SaaS. There might be some technical terms that if you are a non-technical founder, you need to understand but I will try my best to explain to you all that I can.
Before we start, if you want to take a deep dive into running a successful AI-based SaaS business and want to know all the key strategies and points, I’ve written a book “Cheat Code for Building AI-Driven SaaS”. This book will provide you with extensive guidance and you will find your path for building your AI-based SaaS.
To understand things better I’ve divided them into 5 different topics each of which we will cover one by one.
#1 Have proper monitoring and Admin Dashboard setup 💪
Monitoring is the must need for any SaaS software, and I’m just not talking about monitoring the health of servers, what I mean to say is to monitor the core functionality of your SaaS application.
You need to keep track of the functions, routes, APIs, or anything else which are responsible for performing the USP of your SaaS product.
First, make sure it’s performing as it needs to be performed.
Second track how many requests are coming in the peak hours on that API and if there are any loops or cases it’s getting stuck in.
Third, do not open the API routes as public access, make sure it is well protected under a private route and only registered users can access it.
Mostly we use Microservices Architecture to distribute our services to different domains and if one fails there is no effect on another.
Keep track also of what other function it is calling in the background and are any of those functions getting crashed or producing the wrong output. You need to take care of these things in a development environment and once everything is fine then you need to move to production. Make sure to have a subset of data from production on which you can test these functions.
For infrastructure and servers, you can use software like Newrelic or 24x7 to keep the performance of your servers and database functioning.
#2 Make sure to check the traffic coming to your database ➡️
This is very important most of the time we don’t take care of our database and we keep it open in public, and this happens during the development phase only to test things out and build things faster.
You need to take care the database that your SaaS is using is not accepting any traffic from the public internet it should only be communicating with the backend service APIs.
You need to make sure that your database is kept inside a VPC and only accepts traffic from the API Gateway.
#3 Have proper automated test and edge cases written for your code 🧑💻
Automated tests are very important, but please don’t compare this with the monitoring, whenever a developer is pushing the code some tests are performed on the code so to check if all the functionality is good.
But when it comes to monitoring there we can check the logs and performance of the function on real-time actual user data rather than some test data.
Testing is important as it helps your SaaS avoid any basic breakdown and catch things up in the development phase only, this also saves you time as you will see fewer bugs coming in the monitoring phase.
#4 Create a manual checklist every time there is a new release on production ✅
If you have users who are paying you for your SaaS then you must need to be careful of what you are deploying.
Once things are deployed in the production server you must need to manually check some of the major functionality that your SaaS is having.
This is a normal checklist that we have from where we can check things by going manually in the SaaS
#5 Implement proper DevOps and CI/CD Pipeline setups for healthy deployments ❤️🩹
CI/CD pipelines are very important as they ensure all the deployment that you are doing passes from the test cases that you have written and once all the things are passed it moves to production.
Let's suppose during the building there are some problems which come or something that was not suitable as per the production environment that got left out and pushed to production. Thus the CI/CD pipelines will detect such errors and will not deploy things on the production.
It will also keep the latest suitable version running and if anything breaks in the latest version it will roll back the previous stable version. And if anything you detect that is wrong in the latest version you can easily roll back to the older version which is a stable one.
If you take care of these things you will be able to push the healthy deployment and keep your SaaS running on production without bug proof.
I also wanted to share with you a book that I recently wrote on marketing if you want to take a deep dive into marketing and know how to get long-term paying customers for your SaaS, “Marketing Strategies to Grow Your SaaS” which will cover all the necessary steps and strategies in depth to help you take your SaaS from scratch and get some real paying users.
