SaaS for Developers Gwen

You can't manage what you don't measure, and this includes your cloud costs. But how detailed should this measurement be? And how will the data translate into impact?

I sat down with Adam Shugar, co-founder and CTO of Dashdive, to discuss his approach to cloud costs. He shared his advice, not only on cost cutting but also technology, growing a startup, the importance of community and more.

Bill Tarr has the most interesting job in the world. He and his team of SaaS Evangelists at the AWS SaaS Factory work with companies large and small to help them build SaaS on AWS.

In this conversation, we discuss the different ways technology and business interact when building SaaS - from cool technical options available only to SaaS companies to the importance of knowing the cost of a tenant. This hour is packed with advice for both the technical and the business side of building a viable SaaS.

Links mentioned in the show:
Prime Day team on observability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOYOvp6X10g
Bill Tarr on SaaS Architecture Pitfalls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOYOvp6X10g
WrapStream's architecture: https://youtu.be/ceWOw8rxDOM?si=uECCtW0SJ1Sffqn_
Alcion's zero cost multi-region architecture: https://youtu.be/kJECSpVwM7Q?si=_j9LZWdoA5xpFC3g

Ryan Worl, co-founder and CTO of WarpStream, is on a mission to re-engineer fundamental infrastructure on top of S3. Starting with metrics at Uber, continuing with Husky - DataDog's platform for events, logs and everything except metrics and then... Ryan thought "it will be cool to re-build Kafka on S3", reached out to other developers to hear their thoughts... and ended up building WarpStream.

In this episode we talk about Ryan's journey, how S3 can fundamentally change the way we design our infrastructure, and why it is a good idea to go in that direction. We talk about S3 vs S3 express. What will be the perfect serverless experience for streams. And finally, tune in at minute 50:00 to get excellent advice on how a SaaS provider should use logs.

We invited Anna Povzner, director of engineering at Confluent, to the show to discuss Kora. Kora is a Cloud Native platform based on Apache Kafka, which her team at Confluent built. Anna and her team recently published a paper about Kora in VLDB 2023, and it won the industry's best paper award.

Kora VLDB paper: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol16/p3822-povzner.pdf

In our conversation, we discussed:
- Capacity abstractions for serverless Kafka
- Reconciling design constraints into a cohesive architecture
- Key components of the architecture: Rebalances, quotas, cells.
- How to drive deep technical innovation at a fast-growing company
- Delivering low and predictable latency with Apache Kafka

In the last year or two I started hearing a lot about cell-based architectures. Usually in the form of “We had a lot of issues scaling our infrastructure, but then we moved to cell-based architectures” and “I wish I’ve learned about cell based architectures earlier, it would have saved me a lot of pain”. As a result, I’ve wanted to share knowledge about cell-based architectures with this community for a while now.

I was lucky that Eno Thereska called me and suggested to do just that! Eno, currently at Alcion, is one of the most impressive technical leaders I’ve head the pleasure of working with. He has deep theoretical knowledge that he knows how to use for very practical technical solutions. And in this presentation and discussion, he shares both theory and practical advice.

We discussed everything from the basics of cell based architectures, their benefits all the way to different heuristics for assigning tenants to cells.

Papers and talks we discussed:

AWS Fargate under the hood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr-zOaBGyEA
Doordash - Journey to cell-based micro services architecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReRrhU-yRjg
Slack’s Migration to Cellular Architecture: https://slack.engineering/slacks-migration-to-a-cellular-architecture/
Kora: A cloud-native event streaming platform for Kafka: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol16/p3822-povzner.pdf

Krishna Raman has many years of experience building platforms for developers. Now he's applying this experience at Delta Streams to build a serverless platform for stream processing in SQL.

In our conversation, we discussed the serverless developer experience, some of the secret sauce behind Delta Stream's Flink Operator, how to deliver a bring-your-own-account SaaS, K8s network policies and why they matter and when you shouldn't use K8s at all.