Top 5 SaaS Development Challenges You Need To Know
Software as a Service is a delivery model of business solutions where the application is hosted on the provider’s server and available for the client as a subscription service. This means that SaaS applications do not require installation and the product can be used through a mobile app or through a browser, which made it the most popular delivery method for startups.
SaaS projects are becoming more and more popular among businesses. There is the CRM, ERP software, project management, email marketing, collaboration software, vertical applications etc. Thanks to the experience I have gained working on SaaS projects I have come up with top 5 SaaS development challenges that are to be faced during the process no matter what kind of a SaaS solution you will go after:
1. Custom third-party payment integration
The payment functionality is an essential part of a SaaS product. Usually, it is achieved by integrating a system with a third-party payment service. The integration heads towards two ends: the easy way and the more demanding one. The easy is a payment service with great support for the integration. On the other hand is a little bit more challenging way, where the development team needs to examine the technical aspects and challenges behind payment integration and create the appropriate application parts such as services and facades to integrate the external payment service seamlessly. The standard payment solutions already expose necessary libraries to integrate. Such services are for instance PayPal, Secure Trading, QuickPay, Skrill or Braintree, which we implemented on many projects. What is important is that a development team creates a set of automated and manual tests, to ensure the payment integration work properly.
2. Safe and well-defined database access that is GDPR compliant
With the GDPR restrictions taking over the world, as well as standard tenants protection, secure databases design is a necessary part of a successful SaaS product. On top of that, with projects for the American clients, there are specific systems (like for medical industries) that we need to take additional steps and apply the HIPAA constraints to the system that ensure that patients data do not leak outside of the system boundaries. The GDPR or HIPAA requirements should be defined and implemented from the initial phase in the system. During the system creation, the unit and integration tests need to be implemented to ensure the restrictions of the data access. To have a persisted data storage we usually make use of PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elastic Search for visualization, analysis, and reliable searches, Neo4j and MongoDB for database management and Redis — used as a database, message broker and cache.
3. Guaranteeing zero-downtime deployment
A high priority is also put to the availability of the system. One of the drawbacks that we see from time to time, where the system might not be fully accessible to the user, is when a new system version is released. Here, a development team can tackle is using a zero downtime deployment strategy. The strategy means that during the process of deployment the service is fully responsive and stays that way. In traditional systems, the application notifies the users about scheduled downtime. The blue-green deployment strategy ensures nearly zero-downtime deployment, which makes the SaaS solutions reliable.
4. Managing SaaS subscription lifecycle
One of the ways to handle SaaS plans and subscriptions is to use a ready solution. Sometimes the solution can be already integrated with a payment service, like in the case of Stripe. Stripe has a straightforward approach for taking care of these two things along with payments, exposing its API to be used by the SaaS system. It is well documented and has examples, so developers feel quite comfortable using it. Still, if a SaaS product owner decides to go with a build into the SaaS platform subscriptions and plans management, it is feasible. The good part of this approach is to have it in one place, not being dependent on the external provider, paying only once for developing this solution instead of paying monthly or yearly fees for taking care of this part in the external service. The best way to manage subscription systems is to use prebuild ready-to-use solutions to plan, for payments and subscription management. A SaaS subscription life cycle consists of subscribing, trailing, upgrading, canceling, resubscribing. Proper management of every part of this process is the key to a seamless integration of billing systems into SaaS.
5. Customizable system
Quite importantly, the system needs to be fully customizable, starting from the interface up to the underlying system layers. The customization always remains to be decided by our client or a product owner. We had cases, where the need was to have customization to a subdomain, layout, colors, templates and more for each tenant separately. Handling such requirements might be a demanding task, but if designed and tackled in a lean and agile manner can benefit a lot the system in a longer run.
Summary
SaaS solutions bring a lot of business advantages like lowering production costs, faster development, great flexibility. It is getting attention from both vendors and consumers. It is estimated that by 2020 a quarter of organizations will be using SaaS as their core CRM systems. Due to the ease of development and reach capabilities the future of SaaS looks bright, outpacing the traditional product delivery. A successful SaaS project means a customizable system with safe, GDPR compliant database, zero-downtime deployment, fully integrated with third-party payment infrastructures.
Originally published at selleo.com.
