Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - SaaS microservices deep dive: Simplifying multi-tenant development (SAS405)

Summary

Michael Beardsley, a solutions architect from the AWS SaaS Factory team, presented on building SaaS microservices.
The SaaS Factory's goal is to make AWS the best place for building SaaS solutions by providing best practices, guidance, and reusable content.
The session covered the architecture of microservices, emphasizing the importance of independent scaling, deployment, and data ownership for each service.
Key SaaS considerations include tiering, data insights, tenant context, consumption-based pricing, and identity management.
The talk highlighted the need for encapsulation to improve developer productivity by hiding complexity and promoting reuse.
Beardsley discussed the importance of tenant context in requests, using JWT tokens for passing tenant IDs, and the need for error handling and logging.
He explained the use of AWS SDK clients with scoped-down permissions for data access and the use of IAM roles and policies for security.
The session also touched on DevOps considerations in a SaaS environment, such as tenant onboarding, lifecycle management, and infrastructure provisioning.
Beardsley concluded by discussing options for sharing reusable constructs across microservices, including shared libraries, background processes, network proxies, middleware, and Lambda extensions.

Encapsulation is crucial in SaaS microservices to manage complexity and ensure that developers can focus on delivering customer-centric features.
Tenant context is essential for SaaS applications, and JWT tokens are a secure and efficient way to pass tenant IDs within requests.
Runtime security policies are a powerful feature in AWS that allows for fine-grained access control and should be leveraged in multi-tenant SaaS applications.
DevOps practices in a SaaS environment must account for the dynamic nature of tenant interactions, including onboarding, tier changes, and subscription cancellations.
The choice of technology (EC2, containers, Lambda) impacts how shared constructs are implemented and reused across microservices, with each having its own set of best practices and limitations.
AWS provides a variety of tools and services, such as Lambda layers and extensions, to help manage shared code and extend functionality in serverless architectures.
The AWS SaaS Factory offers a wealth of resources, including code samples and best practices, to help organizations accelerate their SaaS development on AWS.