Hacking SaaS #30 - All the news that fits to SaaS

SaaS-y topics from Re: Invent, VLDB papers and more

We are just a month into 2024, but January was a bit intense and we SaaS developers have a lot of catching up to do. Perhaps the biggest personally is that the company I co-founded, Nile, announced our funding. We got a lot of support on social media after the announcement - if this included you, we deeply appreciate.

Now on to SaaS news!

News from Re:Invent

I know, I know, re:Invent is *so* 2023. But I finally got recommendations for the best parts.

Bill Tarr, SaaS advocate at AWS SaaS Factory joined the SaaS Developer YouTube to discuss the SaaS Factory, Re:Invent news, per-tenant cost tracking and much more.

Bill also wrote a blog post with the re-invent announcements we should care about. I highly recommend reading it and following the links. I’m sure at least one announcement will be a game changes for every reader.

Observability plays a key part in all SaaS architectures, not to mention the observability companies that are part of this community. If you are curious about observability news from re:Invent, AWS conveniently summarized things in one blog.

And if you want to combine the two hottest SaaS topics, costs and observability, the spicy Charity Majors talks about the ever increasing costs of observability. I’m definitely feeling it, and I suspect many of you do as well.

Bill also recommended few good re:Invent talks that were published on YouTube. The first is by the Amazon Prime Day team - one of the highest scale operations on the planet. Prime day is like Black Friday, only orders of magnitudes worse. One day, tons of traffic and failure is not an option. They talk about techniques they use to avoid overload and collapse of their service.

The second talk is by Bill himself. Maybe not quite as exciting as Prime Day, but a lot more useful for us, normal SaaS developers. Bill talks about architecture pitfalls for SaaS, and I can’t imagine a more relevant topic.

OK, we are done with the videos for this newsletter. The rest is text.

CIDR 2024

CIDR, one of the largest database conferences, and one with a strong reputation for combining insights from academia and industry. It took place in San Francisco in January and while I’m not even close to catching up, I did find few noteworthy talks for y’all.

MotherDuck published a paper on their cloud architecture and their client. MotherDuck is “DuckDB as a service”, which is pretty interesting because DuckDB itself is an embedded data store. Their architecture of choice is Serverless store with shared storage layer and dedicated compute that scales up and down - similar in spirit to the Aurora architecture. They touch in passing about rebalancing concerns and challenges in allocating compute resources that align with query plans, but unfortunately don’t go into the depth I’d love to see.

The always fantastic, Pat Helland, gave a talk with the provocative title “Scalable OLTP in the Cloud: What’s the BIG DEAL?” I’m going to spend a lot of time thinking about this paper. Pat Helland tries to understand the theoretical limits on scaling OLTP systems, argues that the limits are a result of the expected transactional semantics, and suggests that the key to the solution is cooperation of the app and the DB. Ideas around app/DB cooperation have been raised by various research groups for the last few years, and it is exciting to see them evolve.

Murat, one of my favorite bloggers, wrote a short blog that clarifies Pat Helland’s and provides perspective. You may want to read it before reading Pat’s paper - Murat’s blog helps orient around the paper.

Murat also blogged about my favorite topic - Postgres. He discusses Postgres origin story and some of the key features that he sees as the sources to its success.

InfoQ on the changing face of Serverless

I am endlessly fascinating by the evolution of Serverless products and architectures. From the controversial FaaS, through the “everything is serverless” marketing hype phase… I feel like we are finally getting to a point where the serverless landscape offers practical solutions to real problems faced by SaaS developers - elasticity, flexible costs, low latency, geographical distribution.

This article by Birgim Ibryam, discussed the changes in the serverless ecosystem. He sees a trend toward “hyperspecialization” of serverless - a move away from the broad offerings of the large cloud providers. He talks about the basic primitives of serverless architectures and how they are currently in the process of unbundling by large number of providers. And he helpfully includes a map of the space.

And related, InfoQ published my presentation from last May where I discuss different serverless data stores, and the architecture patterns behind them. 7 month is an eternity in cloud databases, so this talk is worth revisiting.

Marketing to developers

For obvious reasons, I’m interested in how different companies market to developers - an audience that is famously resistant to marketing. Sentry is one of my favorite observability vendors - great developer experience all around at a very fair price. They discuss their journey and lessons learned. Starting with the awesome title (marketing lesson in itself):" You Suck at Marketing.

Some companies see Product Hunt as a critical part of launching new products. Other’s see it as a distraction with just marketers marketing to themselves. No matter how you see it, if you look at the most successful products launched there - you can find some SaaS-y gems. They announced their 2023 Golden Kitty awards and it is worth a Quick Look.

And you can’t mention marketing to developers without mentioning Hacker News. Let’s close off this newsletter with a data scientist who tried to optimize for hacker news success. You judge if this has real insights or if this is closer to astrology.