Hacking SaaS #31 - Catching up edition

SaaS Developer Meetup, Postgres Conference, and a lot of other news that happened while we were busy shipping things.

It’s been a while since our last newsletter, and there is a lot of news to catch up on. Grab your favorite beverage and settle in for a batch of talks, decks, and blogs that will help you stay current on the many technologies used to build SaaS today.

In-person SaaS Community Meetup

Since the last newsletter, we’ve had our second-ever in-person meetup. Thanks to AWS SaaS Factory for supplying the space and the Pizza. It was great meeting the community and more than a few new faces.

If you’d like to know when the next meetup will happen, your best option is to join our Slack or community meetup. We also post announcements on Twitter and Linkedin, but you never know what the algorithms will do.

We opened the event with Madhukar Thumma from AWS SaaS Factory, who introduced us to the SaaS Builder Toolkit. This OSS framework lets you SaaSify your application in just a few lines of code. It integrates with various authentication, authorization, and billing services, including AWS services and third parties. They are also looking for additional third-party vendors to integrate with, so feel free to join our Slack and DM Madhukar Thumma and/or Bill Tar about SBT.

Then, it was time for the main speakers of the evening, and thanks to Bill Tar, we even had an impromptu iPhone-based recording of the talks.

We had Colt McNealy talk about his approach to observability and how to use workflow engines to get better insights into your business processes—especially when they go wrong. The talk included a live demo and very funny examples.

Kshtiji and Arsh from Orb discuss the challenges surrounding usage-based billing and how Orb evolved its architecture to tackle one of the biggest challenges—timely usage alerts.

It was a fantastic community event, and we hope to see you there next time!

Postgres Conference - Silicon Valley

I spent last week in PostgresConf SV - the largest Postgres conference in North America. Conferences are a good way to keep in touch with what’s new in the ecosystem and what topics are on people’s minds.

Few of my event highlights:

• AWS’s Jignesh Shah gave a talk about AWS’s contributions to the community. In one of the slides, he showed which EC2 machines are recommended for Postgres. He also mentioned the trusted language extensions, which allow loading extensions (in certain languages) to AWS’s managed Postgres.

• I was surprised and impressed by the wide range of deployment options I’ve heard mentioned by the audience - from the old-school installations in traditional datacenters, all the way to containers on K8s in cloud vendors.

• Not surprisingly, there were many genAI related talks. Some focused more on getting good performance out of pg_vector, but most taught the audience to build an end-to-end solution where Postgres was a key part of a larger system.

• I gave two talks. Both were well attended and I also enjoyed the deep and thoughtful questions from the audience. First talk was about schema upgrades (also known as “migrations) and covered some well known issues, as well as Nile’s approach to distributed upgrades. Second talk was an overview of transaction isolation, demonstrated with cats.

Catching up on SaaS news!

In case you missed it, there was a fun little security scare at the beginning of the month, where a version of SSH with a backdoor was almost shipped in popular Linux distributions. Luckily, the sophisticated backdoor was caught in time by Postgres core committer Andreas Freund. Both the backdoor and the discovery are fascinating. I recommend reading the original bug report, the high level summary (with diagrams) from ArsTechnica, and the deep dive with many links from Sam James.

If you haven’t been following HashiCorp vs OpenTofu, you may want to do so - especially since so many SaaS companies use Terraform for deployments. Few month back HashiCorp re-licensed Terraform to a more restrictive business license. Since a few cloud deployment providers rely on Terraform code to some extent, this caused immediate concern and the formation of a Terraform fork called OpenTofu. Recently, Matt Assay published an article accusing OpenTofu of essentially stealing Terraform code. HashiCorp sent cease and desist to OpenTofu and OpenTofu wrote a detailed breakdown denying all allegations. The New Stack has a good article covering the situation.

Vercel, the company behind the popular Javascript framework NextJS and one of the leading frontend hosting vendors, has taken a step back and removed the server-side rendering at the edge functionality. Their developer advocate explains the reasons, essentially - it makes no sense to render at the edge unless your database is at the edge. And unfortunately, most databases are not.

Nile, the company I founded, is moving a tiny bit closer to the edge by introducing new regions and an improved SDK that supports connecting to any database in any regions using just the credentials. I recorded a short video explaining how to use the new SDK and demonstrating why and how to pick new regions for your SaaS.

New and exciting distributed testing company, Antithesis, is offering a framework for determenistic simulation testing. They recently published a video of an old talk, explaining what they do, how they do it and why it is valuable.

Oldie-but-goodie blog from Netflix on CPU isolation between containers and optimizing container placement. It is interesting to read, but worth noting that if you are running on ARM servers (and Graviton on AWS is a great deal), then everything it says about NUMA is irrelevant. There is no NUMA on ARM processors.

If you are in an engineering leadership position, this article on giving tough and honest feedback may be interesting and perhaps even contain useful ideas.

Inspiring article on what it takes to build something of high quality, something users truly love.

On SaaS Developer YouTube - Cost Optimization

On the SaaS Developer YouTube, I interviewed Adam Shugar, founder of DashDive. We talked about his journey to build DashDive - SaaS for optimizing cloud costs. We discussed the close relationship between observability problems and cost optimization problems (and no, I’m not talking about the latest invoice from DataDog). We also talked about technology trends, whether or not a startup should use K8s, his experience with YCombinator and cost optimization advice.