Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Scaling a SaaS company for public company readiness (STP307)

Summary

Speaker: John Hyman, co-founder and CTO of Braze.
Company Overview: Braze is an enterprise SaaS business that personalizes messaging for brands, engaging over 4.1 billion monthly active users and sending approximately 1.5 trillion messages last fiscal year.
Public Company Readiness: Emphasizes the importance of a predictable, consistent, and scrutinized engineering organization for public company readiness.
Key Focus Areas: Reliability, security, cost management, and team efficiency.
Reliability: Braze transitioned to a 24/7 on-call team, defined service-level objectives, formalized incident response, and conducted systematic reviews.
Security: Achieved ISO 27001 certification and SOC 2 type 2 audits, built a security team, and conducted annual tabletop exercises.
Cost Management: Implemented cost tagging and forecasting within 5% accuracy, used AWS technologies for cost analysis, and established a core committee for cost optimization projects.
Entitlements and Audits: Developed a new billing system to track and defend every cent of revenue, audited internal access, and built a capitalization process for engineering time.
Modularity and Efficiency: Improved tooling for independent team operations, built a deployment tool, and adopted SOPS for secret management.

Reliability and Scalability: Braze's approach to reliability involves not just process improvements but also architectural changes, such as the SMS backup endpoint using AWS Route 53 for regional DNS routing.
Security as a Priority: Security is not just about compliance but also about maintaining customer trust, which is why Braze has a dedicated security team and a public bug bounty program.
Cost Optimization: Braze's detailed cost management process, including the use of AWS Cost Explorer and Kubernetes, demonstrates the importance of financial efficiency and margin optimization for SaaS companies.
Billing System and Revenue Defense: The new billing system that tracks the provenance of data and integrates with Snowflake for billing data centralization highlights the complexity of revenue recognition for public companies.
Engineering Culture and Tooling: The emphasis on modularity and efficiency, as well as the development of internal tools like the deployment tool and SOPS for configuration management, reflects the need for a strong engineering culture that scales with the company.