Hacking SaaS #29 - 2024 predictions and cloud costs

Kicking off 2024 with few trends for the coming year, the biggest being - how do we save money while building our SaaS?

Happy new year! Wishing all SaaS developers an amazing year. Lets resolve to learn from each other, share what we learned, build great architectures and tell everyone about them, build some quick hacks and tell everyone how we broke things, delight customers, have fun and change the world.

2024 - Lets Go!

Fireship, a popular tech YouTube for web developers has a short and entertaining trends and predictions video:

I’m not sure I’d sign off on all the predictions there (I gave up on predicting anything crypto-related a decade ago), but it is safe to predict that the AI trend will keep going strong.

A trend that Fireship didn’t mention is Postgres. In 2023 Postgres made it to the top of the DB Engine ranking, making it the “DB of the Year”. Not for the first time either, Postgres was the DB of the year 4 times in the last decade.

Jonathan Katz, one of the few top core contributors to Postgres wrote a fantastic blog post on the direction the Postgres community is taking in 2024 and beyond, along various key dimensions: Availability, performance, developer features, security, extensions and community. Great writeup and well worth reading.

The discussion in Hacker News is also fantastic and well worth reading. It has a lot of wishlist items - things folks would like Postgres to do. This includes industry-standard replication formats, extensible searching, better handling of connections, better availability options and more. One comment, responding to “why would anyone care about 1s downtime” is especially good:

I run a service that sells theatre tickets and, far more critically, a service to check if a ticket is valid or not.

Tickets are checked, by scanning a QR code, as people walk though the door. Not only do people hate sitting in their seat waiting (or worse, standing in line waiting)... you also need to pay a couple hundred employees to stand around and do nothing while waiting - ballpark cost of wages might be $5 for every second you can cut from the process of people walking through the door. On top of that wages cost, people waiting for the show to start don't buy drinks at the bar. A lot of events make more money on drink sales than ticket sales... often a high percentage of ticket sale revenue goes to whoever has a copyright claim to the show. They often get a cut of drink sales too, but it's a smaller cut.

This continues for many more paragraphs, going into the nitty gritty details of how latency sensitive every aspect of show biz can be, and how this is handled today. If you love knowing these nerdy behind the scenes bit, you’ll love it.

Elsewhere, folks are wondering if “just enough availability” is the current trends, as CTOs with tight budgets discover they’d rather not pay for all those 9s. Kelly Sommers shared the observation on Twitter, and a bunch of folks agreed.

Costs of Cloud

I interviewed Ryan Worl from WarpStream, and he shared his insights on how data-intensive applications can become significantly cheaper to operate by being smarter about how they leverage S3:

This aligns nicely with an older article I’d read that did an analysis and discovered that cloud costs are not dropping as the author expected.

If anyone has more recent data, I’d love that. I think this matches what I’ve seen as well - the big cost savings in the cloud come from watching the new cloud products (and new features in existing products), discovering those that offer better price/performance for your use-case and jumping on those. Examples include moving from the standard EC2 machines to the graviton based ones (or even AMD), moving from GP2 to GP3 storage, replacing NAT with EC2-based solution, and apparently finding good ways to use S3 is up there as well.

I think “cut costs” is on everyone’s new year resolution list (or on the normal todo list). I hope to share more great suggestions and learnings from the community. It is near impossible for any one SaaS developer to follow all the new cloud offerings and infrastructure SaaS to figure out the best deals - but together we can do it!