

SaaS vendors, eat your own dogfood, or die - edw519
http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=458

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brk
I think that too many people get hung up on the first "S" in SaaS, when it's
really about the last "S".

SaaS is not about playing hot potato with the server infrastructure and trying
to farm it out to the lowest bidder. SaaS is about providing _your_ customer
with a reliable software platform, while removing headaches and leveraging
economies of scale.

There is no reason for every little company to have their own micro server-
farm to host their CRM app. There is no reason for every company to maintain
internal knowledge on the care and feeding of that app. These companies can
benefit from outsourcing the care and feeding and hosting of that CRM app to a
centralized provider, like Salesforce.

SaaS vendors _should_ eat their own dog food. They should use their own app,
to the extent possible, so they experience what the customer experiences. SaaS
vendors also need to make sure that app is always up, always online, and
always zippy. You can't really do that if you outsource a key piece of what
makes the app what it is: the server infrastructure.

At my last company, someone used the phrase "you can't outsource liability" a
lot. That applies here as well for SaaS vendors, you can't completley
outsource the "liability" of your server farm without also losing control of
your ability to provide availability to your customers. You can reduce overall
liability by taking advantages of things like S3/EC2, but you can't eliminate
it.

As my own company is delivering an SaaS app, and building the infrastructure
to make it available, I have said many times that EVERY datacenter provider
WILL have an extended outage at some point. Put all your eggs in one basket,
and it's just a waiting game. Spread your chips out to different vendors AND
different geographic areas and you better ensure that you have no one single
point of failure.

The SaaS vendors who think they are only about the software, and try to
outsource 100% of the computing cloud are the ones that will die. The SaaS
vendors that recognize what their customers are actually buying (a hosted app
all inclusive) will fare better in the long run.

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tritchey
So they just moved their service over to S3, eh? Nice timing on the article
with the outage this morning.

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edw519
I think the real question is one of reliability. Which is the most likely to
fail, your server, your host's, or something on the cloud? How many 9's do we
need before we can evolve?

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pchristensen
I do wonder about building services on top of services on top of services.
Since you have to multiply their availability, you get an overall level of
service that's lower than each of its components. I think the answer for high
reliability built on top of services will be to have each layer run off of
multiple services (for example: storage on S3 AND local servers AND someone
else's cloud disk) with seamless failover between them. Lots of work, but if
you can't stand to be down, them's the breaks.

~~~
joe24pack
sounds like "stacking of errors" that will put the whole operation out of
tolerance fairly quickly.

