Architecting a Successful SaaS

Interacting with your Customer’s Cloud Accounts

Originally published on the AWS APN Blog.

You’re a software vendor selling a SaaS product hosted on the cloud. As part of your solution, the SaaS product needs to interact with your customer’s cloud-based resources — their data, their applications, or perhaps their compute resources. As a vendor, you must architect your SaaS product, and its capability to interact with your customer’s cloud-based resources to be scalable, reliable, performant, cost-optimized, and most importantly, secure. In this post, we will explore several common AWS services and architectural patterns used by SaaS vendors to interact with their customer’s AWS accounts. Although multi-cloud and hybrid cloud SaaS interactions are also prevalent in many SaaS solutions, for brevity we will limit ourselves to interactions across accounts within AWS.

Reasons for Interaction

There are many reasons SaaS products need to interact with a customer’s AWS Accounts. Examples of SaaS products that require some level of account interaction often fall into the categories of logging and monitoring, security, compliance, data analytics, DevOps, workflow management, and…