Serverless Architecture for B2B SaaS Products: Benefits and Considerations

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In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses demand real-time insights and seamless experiences from their software solutions. For B2B SaaS companies, delivering cutting-edge analytics capabilities has become a game-changer. This empowers customers to make data-driven decisions that drive meaningful business growth everyone is striving for today.

But what if you could offer advanced, embedded analytics without the traditional overhead of maintaining servers and infrastructure? Enter serverless architecture – a revolutionary cloud computing model that’s transforming the way B2B SaaS companies approach analytics.

With serverless, you can bid farewell to the complexities of provisioning, scaling, and maintaining servers. This frees up your team to focus on what truly matters: building innovative products that delight your customers.

At Qrvey, this goes hand in hand with our mission to have you build less software while delivering more value to your customers. Let’s dive in.

What is Serverless Architecture?

Serverless architecture is a way to build and deploy applications in the cloud without needing to spin up servers. In serverless architecture, the cloud provider (i.e. AWS) handles all the underlying infrastructure, including provisioning, scaling, and maintenance. This frees up developers to focus on writing code and building products that deliver value to their users.

This deployment path is great for B2B SaaS products that are popular and need to be able to grow easily. Check out our in-depth guide on what is serverless software development.

How serverless architecture benefits B2B SaaS companies

Reduce costs

Serverless architecture is a pay-as-you-go model, so companies only pay for the resources that they use. This can lead to significant cost savings, especially for companies with fluctuating traffic patterns.

Improve Scalability

By adjusting its capacity based on demand, these applications can handle sudden traffic increases. This gives companies peace of mind about their system’s performance.

Speed up development

Serverless architecture eliminates the need to manage servers, which can significantly reduce development time. This allows companies to get their products to market faster.

How serverless applies to embedded analytics features within B2B SaaS products

Adding analytics to B2B software can help businesses make better decisions, improve operations, and serve customers more effectively. Serverless analytics tools enable embedding analytics features into B2B SaaS products in a number of ways.

For example, embedded analytics tools are useful to:

Collect and process data from a variety of sources

Serverless analytics tools gather and analyze data from different sources. These can include databases, logs, and IoT devices without needing a server. You can then use this data to generate insights that can help improve the product and better serve customers.

Provide real-time analytics

Analytics tools help businesses make quicker decisions by providing real-time analytics for informed decision-making. A B2B SaaS product can utilize serverless analytics to provide businesses with real-time insights on inventory and demand.

This helps businesses effectively manage their stock levels. This information could then be useful to optimize inventory levels and avoid stockouts.

Create interactive dashboards and reports

Analytics tools great for creating interactive dashboards and reports. This enables users of a SaaS platform to visualize and analyze data within the SaaS application. This can make it easier for businesses to identify trends and patterns in their data.

Embedding analytics tools within B2B SaaS products offers several benefits, including:

Improved customer experience

Embeddable analytics features in B2B SaaS products can help businesses provide a better customer experience. For example, B2B software can use analytics to quickly provide businesses with data on sales and pipeline. Sales teams can use this information to close more deals and improve their bottom line.

Increased product stickiness

Embedding analytics features into B2B SaaS products can increase product stickiness. This is because businesses are less likely to churn from a product that provides them with valuable insights into their data.

New revenue opportunities

Embedded analytics within B2B SaaS products can open up new revenue opportunities. Businesses can charge more for advanced analytics or sell anonymous data to other companies for profit.

Considerations when using serverless architecture for B2B SaaS products

While serverless architecture offers many benefits for B2B SaaS products, there are a few considerations to keep in mind. These include:

Vendor lock-in

Serverless architecture can lead to vendor lock-in, as companies become reliant on a specific cloud provider’s services. To mitigate this risk, companies should choose a cloud provider that offers a wide range of serverless services. A commitment to open standards will help future considerations as well should you ever need to make a change.

Cold starts

What is the meaning of a cold start? When a serverless function initially starts, it may take some time for the function to start up and become responsive. Cold starts can lead to latency, which can be a problem for applications that require real-time response.

To mitigate the impact of cold starts, companies should design their serverless functions carefully and use caching techniques.

Debugging Serverless Functions

Debugging serverless functions can be more challenging than debugging traditional server-based applications. Given the distribution across multiple servers, inspecting functions can pose a challenge. To mitigate this challenge, companies should use a cloud provider that offers good debugging tools and support.

How Qrvey Uses Serverless Services

Overall, serverless architecture is a good choice for B2B SaaS products. It can help companies to reduce costs, improve scalability, and speed up development. Additionally, embedding analytics into B2B SaaS applications gives SaaS companies an advantage over their competition.

When we built the first version Qrvey, our embedded analytics product, we chose to lead with innovative technology. We selected AWS’s serverless offerings to create the infrastructure for our solution.

We wanted our infrastructure to take advantage of on-demand services for the lowest hosting costs possible. Check out more on our AWS analytics platform architecture here.

Our solution has evolved again. While we still use serverless technology when our customer chose to host on AWS, our best embedded analytics software also uses container technology to deploy to Azure, GCP, on-prem and others.

Ultimately, what matters most is empowering our SaaS customers to embed sefl-service analytics.

And doing so in a way that development teams can personalize to any person or use case.

Building with on-demand technology gives us the modern technology stack to make that possible.