Scaling Your SaaS Application
A recent McKinsey survey shows that 63% of enterprise CIOs plan to adopt at least one SaaS app in 2007. IDC estimates the SaaS market's compound annual growth rate to be 20% between now and 2010. Credit Suisse's projections are even more optimistic: 36% annual growth between 2006 and 2011.
If you're a SaaS developer, you're most likely already familiar with these stats. For you, the unanswered question is, what will it take to scale your application from proof of concept to prime time? You don't want to over-invest in hosting infrastructure that might not be utilized for some time. On the other hand, you need the ability to ramp up on-demand. Most importantly, you absolutely must keep each and every customer's data safe.
The good news is, there's one simple solution to all of these challenges: TheGridLayer.
On Demand Scalability
Our hosting platform is powered by 3Tera's AppLogic Grid OS, which allows you to package your entire application into one single self-contained logical entity. The packaged system can be scaled from a fraction of a CPU to hundreds of machines without any code modification. Now you can focus on developing new features that enhance your competitive advantage instead of spending valuable time troubleshooting infrastructure issues.
By the way, you might consider taking whole-application snapshots throughout the development process for easy rollback of problematic upgrades. Snapshots capture the current state of your entire system: code, content and databases. They become ready-to-deploy applications which are compatible with any AppLogic grid.
Multi-tenancy Through Replication
Many SaaS offerings don't rely on sharing data between subscribers. For these applications, Virtual Private Datacenters™ make maintaining applications so simple that it becomes possible to build a SaaS solution by running a copy of your application for each subscriber. By building a simple portal for your customers, they can provision, resize and even backup their own app.
Peace of Mind
100% of your code and each of your customers' data are automatically mirrored across the grid that your application resides on. In the event a physical server becomes unresponsive, all data remains available, and your application is automatically restarted elsewhere on the grid. This means your service will be back online within minutes, not hours.
Web 2.0 & Beyond
Between 1998 and 2006, eBay redesigned its architecture 7 times to accommodate traffic growth. Each iteration required substantial changes to its code. MySpace, too, has gone through the same process. At one point, the company employed two full time technicians to manually redistribute resources on its storage area network between different database instances.
If you're a Web 2.0 developer with grand aspirations, you may have wondered what it'd take to keep the Next Big Thing online. If - actually, WHEN - your service takes off, how will you finance the servers, the data center space, the sysadmins to keep everything up and running?
The good news is, you have access to a hosting platform that wasn't available to the developers of eBay and MySpace. It's called The GridLayer.
On Demand Scalability
The GridLayer is powered by 3Tera's AppLogic Grid OS, which allows you to package your entire application into one single self-contained logical entity. The packaged system can be scaled from a fraction of a CPU to hundreds of machines without any code modification. Now you can focus on implementing new features that your community wants instead of spending valuable time troubleshooting infrastructure issues.
By the way, you might consider taking whole-application snapshots throughout the development process for easy rollback of problematic upgrades. Snapshots capture the current state of your entire system: code, content and databases. They become ready-to-deploy applications which are compatible with any AppLogic grid. This means you can run separate instances of your site at different data centers - just like eBay does, but with no incremental effort!
Peace of Mind
Don't you hate hardware failures? We do. But gone are the days when you have to restore data from backup on replacement servers. At The GridLayer, 100% of your code, content and databases are mirrored across the grid that your application resides on. In the event a physical server become unresponsive, all data remains available, and your application is automatically restarted elsewhere on the grid. This means your service will be back online within minutes, not hours. And you won't have to lift a finger!
Which Solution is Right for You?
If your application or web site fits on a single server, our Virtual Private Servers (VPS) offer a reliable and scalable alternative to traditional dedicated servers. You'll find some familiar functions: full root access to each VPS, and the ability to compile your own kernel/install any software. In addition, you will enjoy built-in high availability, and we'll be able to resize your hosting environment on the fly (more info).
If you have a larger application that runs on a multi-server infrastructure, our Virtual Private Datacenters (VPD) offer a flexible and cost-effective alternative to colocation, private racks or managed services. You will have direct access to provision virtual web/database/application server appliances - not to mention load balancers and firewalls. You will be able to interconnect these components and package your final configuration into one self-contained entity which can be started, stopped, copied, backed up, migrated and resized with a single command (more info).
If you'd like to discuss your requirements with The GridLayer's engineers, please contact us. We look forward to hearing from you!