Overcoming Legacy Issues that Hold SaaS Back Part 5: Easing Improvements

Welcome back! In this six-part series, we’re examining the advantages cloud native development delivers for SaaS providers. You’re welcome to continue reading to learn about benefits to improving your product and, if you like, to also get caught up on the first installments.

Wrangling Legacy 800 lb Gorillas 

With monolithic apps, a single code base often becomes too large to maintain and update. Too many interdependencies create longer cycles and are particularly difficult when it comes to maintenance.

This makes improvement a much more difficult process because monolithic apps are:

• Harder to Scale: Expansion is difficult when everything is packaged together.
• Locked In: Once you’ve selected the tech stack, you’re essentially locked in because any changes to the tech require a complete rewrite.
• Limited: Leveraging best of breed technologies, especially 3rd party components, is much harder since the architecture is less flexible.

A CNCF guest post describes infrastructure-centric development as, “The source of all evil,” and outlines the many problems it causes in making changes. “The fact that production environments require specialized knowledge and operational expertise increases the risk of wrongly specified or inconsistent configuration.”

Development Bottlenecks Lead to Stagnation of Legacy Apps

For every update of a monolithic app, there are substantial prices to be paid. Changes -even incremental ones- are much more time-consuming, making it difficult to implement smaller, more frequent updates. Difficulties in updating can create bottlenecks in the QA process. The result is that product managers and developers need to be more mindful of what enhancements they make to the product. 

Considering the length of time and effort required to update monolithic apps, releases tend to be less frequent, rendering the apps more stagnant.

Cloud Native Eases Updating Individual Components

Cloud native greatly facilitates the processes of improving and optimizing your application in many different ways.

When you want to replace a component of your app, it’s a much easier process in a cloud native environment. Ripping out a component to plug in another is much simpler and problems with ongoing maintenance are greatly diminished, enabling software providers to more easily continue adding value to generate new revenue.

In describing cloud native, AWS states, “Cloud-native technologies support fast and frequent changes to applications without impacting service delivery, providing adopters with an innovative, competitive advantage.”

When you’ve architected your solution around microservices, it’s relatively easy to introduce a new component. You can plug it in and you’re able to solve specific problems and benefit from best of breed components. Making two services talk to one another is much easier than writing code.

Like upgrading a car, you can swap out individual parts, improving the whole. And you can do so without making every change all at once. Upgrade the stereo for improved sound quality. Swap the tires for better performance. Replace the seats with premium leather.

The ease of updating also benefits your go to market efforts, enabling you to move swiftly to meet emerging market demands.

Microservices = Trickle Down Benefits

With AWS cloud native applications, you are backed by the development efforts of one of the world’s largest technology companies. AWS microservices are constantly being improved, which provides you with an inherent advantage. If AWS makes improvements to the microservices you leverage, your app will automatically inherit those improvements – and without having to do any extra work.

Qrvey is architected around AWS services, meaning our offering improves automatically as AWS releases improvements. For example, AWS launched a new version of their Natural Language Processing (NLP) service and BAM! Our app had improved NLP with no effort on our part. Qrvey also uses AWS geospatial mapping location and improvements to that service trickled down to our platform.

Of course, if you embed Qrvey analytics into your app, those types of improvements appear in the functionality you provide to your users.

Focus on Where Your IP Lives

AWS describes how, with cloud native, developers are assured of the consistency and reliability of the operating environment and freed from worrying about hardware incompatibility. “Therefore, developers can focus on delivering values in the app instead of setting up the underlying infrastructure.”

You use a service provider because you rely on their expertise to execute a task better, faster, or more cost-effectively than you could . This enables SaaS providers to focus on their unique competitive advantages and achieve efficiencies of scale.

→ TOP TIP – Where to Start

It’s not a simple task to flip from a monolithic app to microservices, but you can determine where on your roadmap it makes sense to start introducing cloud native services. Embedded analytics is always a good place to start since there are best-of-breed vendors like Qrvey who can help accelerate your cloud native journey. The data pipeline is another good place to start, since there are many tools available that can help you gain efficiencies.

By incorporating a wide variety of analytics functionality and data optimization into a single platform, Qrvey has done the work, so you don’t have to. You can see for yourself exactly what we mean, and what it would mean for you by signing up for a custom demo at Qrvey.com.