When building a (global) SaaS application chances are high that you’re building it in the cloud. The cloud has a lot of advantages – think of scalability – in contrast to local server environments. Therefore this post, and the ones which will follow, focus on software which is built and engineered in the cloud. Here’s how to secure a cloud-based SaaS architecture. More and more SaaS businesses are taking off the ground today. And it’s great. The SaaS business is a super-fast growing industry attracting more and more people and companies. These organizations are more and more floating applications in the cloud. Scaling in the cloud has some essential benefits and risks as well. Starting with this blog post we are going to show you how to start building a cloud-based SaaS architecture, dealing with issues of scalability and what this means for your software stack.

1. @tompeham I @usersnap
FUNDAMENTALS ON BUILDING
A RELIABLE CLOUD-BASED
SAAS ARCHITECTURE

2. THIS IS ME!
@TOMPEHAM I @USERSNAP

3. @TOMPEHAM I @USERSNAP
Say hi!
THIS IS ME!

4. BEFORE WE GET STARTED…
You can find all resources here:
http://goo.gl/Ki3ZEl

5. FUNDAMENTALS ON BUILDING A
HERE ARE THE
A RELIABLE CLOUD-BASED
SAAS ARCHITECTURE

6. Everything in the cloud
When building a (global) SaaS application chances
are high that you’re building it in the cloud. The cloud
has a lot of advantages – think of scalability – in
contrast to local server environments. Here’s
how to secure a cloud-based SaaS architecture.

7. How to get started?
WHICH
LANGUAGE?
WHICH
DATABASE?
WHICH
SOFTWARE?

8. Which programming language?
Building a product for the cloud, means building a product
with a modern programming languages.
There are various (modern) programming languages out
there making it a hard time to choose the right one.
Take a look at the most prominent ones, play around with
those and try to experiment as much as possible.

9. The perfect database
Document databases get their type information from the data itself.
Therefore every instance of data can be different from any other. This
makes it more flexible in dealing with change and optional values,
maps more easily into program objects, and often reduces database
size.
WHY?
We recommend
making use of a
document-oriented
database.

10. MongoDB – the database for your web app?
We – at Usersnap – ended using MongoDB as our
prior database. Why we choose MongoDB?
Because MongoDB is a document oriented
database that provides high performance, high
availability, and easy scalability.
Why MongoDB?
Scaling your tech with MongoDB is pretty easy (ok, at least easier compared to
other databases). With automatic sharding you can distribute data across
various machines.

11. MongoDB – the database for your web app?
Sharding is basically a
method for storing your
data across multiple
machines. And MongoDB
uses sharding to support
deployment with large
data sets.

12. Queuing system
Let’s talk about a queuing system
now.
A message queuing system is an
asynchronous communication
protocol, enabling sender and
receiver of a message not
interacting at the same time.
Message queuing technology
enables web apps to run at
different times and to
communicate with various 3rd
party integrations / APIs / and
other other services
asynchronously.

13. RambitMQ (the system we use)
Python with the open source celery task management library is the
perfect fit to get the most out of RabbitMQ. We’re using a single
RabbitMQ server, with multiple endpoints that feed the queue with
tasks as well as endpoints that process those tasks (e.g. produce our
nice-looking screenshots).
How we installed RabbitMQ
Again, I’d like to give you some insights on the queuing
system we use, RabbitMQ. We run our web app in on the
AWS EC2 where RabbitMQ can be run installed and run
super smoothly.

14. AWS & EC2
Building a scalable web app you’ll
probably end up at using Amazon
Web Services sooner or later. Our
guess is sooner ;)
AWS enables you to host and run
your web apps as well as
performing massive high-
performing batch jobs. With
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) AWS
provides scalable virtual servers
for every business.

15. Why EC2?
The Amazon EC2 is a must-have for
and the heart of our system which
provides resizable computing
capacity. We basically have rented
virtual servers on which our web app
runs.
Currently we have three EC2 servers
which are located in the US, Ireland
and Singapore. We’ll keep adding
further locations (especially in the US
and Europe) since the demand of our
product keeps increasing. With the
EC2 installed it’s super easy to keep
adding new servers and resources.

16. Web Storage S3
Getting more and more users on
board for your product will make you
easily wonder about your web
storage. With the Amazon S3 storage
service we have a great, and highly-
scalable object storage installed.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is
easy to use, store and retrieve any
amount of data. Beside storing your
data of your web app with S3, it might
work great for backups, archives or
big data analytics.

17. CDN & the big cloudy picture
A content delivery network is basically a system of distributed servers which enables you to serve
content to your app users with high performance and high availability.
Let’s assume you have 3 EC2s installed. One in the US, one in Europe and one in Singapore. If someone
from New York visits your app, the CDN enables you to serve content to the user through the EC2
located in the US.
How we at Usersnap have
set up our web app and the
role of EC2, S3 and CDN.

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