Open Source SaaS: Top 5 Solutions & FAQs in 2024

Open Source SaaS, and Serverless Architecture: An Emerging Frontier

While scalability and speed are essential in building new SaaS companies, especially with promoting the rate of change and creating a positive-sum game in the market, some SaaS startups have a good competitive advantage by using new IT to scale and innovate fast.

In line with the recent level of advancement in IT infrastructure, there are three such approaches that you can use to accelerate business building for an established company quickly. These three trifectas of technology approaches give SaaS companies formidable tools to use if they want to scale and do that securely, rapidly and effectively at cheaper or lower costs. These three approaches are serverless architecture, software as a service (SaaS), and open-source code. Let’s take a look at them.

Open-source code is that which allows businesses to access for free existing, free software libraries. This software they can then use to integrate into their code.
Software as a service (SaaS) is a cloud-based software delivery business model where companies can use all software applications services they need without investing in installing the IT infrastructure in-house as it is done in the on-premise software delivery.
Serverless architecture is the kind of IT architecture that allows companies to focus on writing code and not running it.

While these approaches can offer distinct advantages, the Breakthrough in growth and scalability of SaaS startups and Businesses is in combining all of them. For example, getting a login service from a third-party SaaS vendor company and combining it with another third-party service from a recruitment management company and firm-specific functions such as salary calculation in a completely serverless architecture.

This kind of combination of technology allows SaaS companies to boost and simplify the development process for starting and scaling their new businesses.

Understanding The Place of Companies Launching New Businesses

SaaS companies trying to launch new businesses had their core reason for combining these three approaches to increase the value of why exists and decrease the hassle they have to go through during development and maintenance.

Companies might also develop a greater mastery of using serverless, and this will lead them to have an advantage of the cyberservices as they are offered by cloud services (CSPs). Though, this entails that they will have to take personalized steps to manage any risk involved.

Other benefits that SaaS companies starting new businesses get are continually emerging as more companies dive in to test the combination of the three approaches.

Many SaaS companies don’t understand the extent of the advantages of Open source, SaaS and Serverless combinations. They believe that their traditional (legacy) systems would work best for them and is the best option for launching a new business. Eventually, they would learn about the ineffectiveness of legacy systems and the limitations it gives to the new business they want to launch.

For Open source, SaaS and serverless to work for newly launched businesses, these companies must reimagine their IT strategy, put in new approaches, entice a new kind of talent, redesign processes, new mindsets, and redesign their security.

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How Do Open Source, SaaS, And Serverless Boost Business Development?

The major reason for the combination of open source, SaaS, and Serverless is to reduce the ineffective use of legacy systems. However, most of the advantages of Serverless and SaaS are gotten because of competition among CSPs to offer the most compatible applications – ‘as a service.’ This competitive trend shows the value of the online cloud as a driver of innovation and reduces the cost of IT.

To launch a new business, SaaS is a good way for them to start their new business. It lets them access a collection of existing services at a cheap fee; the business will pay for the software usually needed through a subscription payment model. This awesome feature saves it the time and cost of installing the complex IT infrastructure for the new business, the time it could have spent the code – there are large standardized libraries of open-source code its developers can access as it needs additional coding to complement that of the SaaS vendor’s software applications.

On the other hand, serverless architecture is top of the game at deploying new tech stacks very fast, and it also makes digital technologies into modular formats that are easily adaptable. This adaptability advantage that your business will get removes the stress of specifying, purchasing, installing, maintaining the operating systems and hardware, and keeping the servers secure that the IT team has to do.

All of the mentioned tasks are handled by the provider when you’re using serverless architecture. This characteristic of the combination of the three technologies removes the overhead cost of operation. Serverless architecture also makes it possible for the IT team to shift the IT infrastructure management and maintenance to the provider and allows the team to create scalable software applications cheaper, faster, easier, and safer.

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Advantages of Open source, SaaS, and Serverless combination.

There are so many other additional benefits from the combination of SaaS, serverless, and open-source that are highly important when you’re considering building and launching new businesses. Some of these include;

1. Decrease in Initial Investment Outlay

For companies that plan to set up and scale quickly, going serverless is a great option. They would have to move from using the existing on-premises software infrastructure, which is more costly to the cloud, and would have to also invest in automation. It often involves some bits of investment as companies move up the stack but is usually more economical when compared to traditional servers. However, these companies can use the opportunity to explore the advantages of the CSPs offerings.

2. Code Purchased is “Closer to the Business”

The use of Serverless and SaaS to free your IT team, among others, decreases the complications that come with app deployment and development. This decrease in complexity allows the IT team to organize around products that bring codes closer to your new business.

This approach also makes it easy for product owners, business owners and analysts to collaborate well and understand the IT team in a cross-functional project.

3. Elimination of Infrastructure Management

Serverless IT operation needs no infrastructure management. It, therefore, will result in zero operational overhead and reduces the need for upgrades. This reduction in infrastructure maintenance and updating time gives the new business more time to develop new products and services that will add more value.

What’s more? Serverless architecture makes access easy to software functions as a service and stops efforts to be wasted on creating IT solutions that already exist. It, therefore, makes it possible for the new business to easily and rapidly test new business functions with its customers and make the necessary changes.

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Disadvantages of Open source, SaaS, and Serverless Combination

It is also important that SaaS companies understand and look into the different drawbacks and challenges of Open source, SaaS and Serverless combinations. Some of the basic challenges and disadvantages which accrue to all types of SaaS companies include;

The utmost need for training
The need to develop stateless application software.
Granular observability
Self-healing application software. An example of this is tools to watch applications heal in a decoupled environment.
Service vendor lock-in over time may also be a concern.

However, these disadvantages and challenges compared with the benefits of Open source, SaaS, and Serverless are greatly outweighed by them.

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Keys To Unlocking the Value of Open Source, SaaS, and Serverless

Businesses in the SaaS space are faced with the significant advantage they can gain in using the combination of three approaches. While these advantages are significant, the changes needed to implement them and harness the advantages are also important. However, there are five areas that SaaS companies need to focus on to get the greatest benefits. They are;

Make use of ‘Modular’ Mindsets

Serverless architecture is a new approach, and some members of the technical team or the whole tev6 team can even underestimate the kind of mindset it requires. Certainly, some IT leaders usually mistakenly think serverless is merely an extra cloud-based feature. However, it includes both just buildings differently but also using the cloud-based technology differently. Starting from bringing a new, more modular approach that functions in a stateless architecture design to changing how database services are used.

Re-Think the IT Architecture

To obtain greater value from combining the three approaches, SaaS needs to reimagine what they do concerning the IT infrastructure to help build their business.

It is important to make the best investment when your business is serverless to make the best low-level infrastructure decisions like synchronous versus asynchronous functions. Hence, it is important to overcome the mistake of making poor architectural decisions which can be highly expensive.

Developing a functionality that matches your business is necessary to give your company the opportunity to change processes and a completely different speed than is currently possible. This increase in functionalities development is especially good for the IT team to customize the IT architecture to solve specific tasks and business processes.

Invest in Tech Product Teams and Tooling

Many companies’ IT teams are not versed in the use of serverless architecture, and therefore you would have to invest in tutoring them as well as in the tools they use. Depending on the company’s starting point, you would have to select whether to upskill the existing teams or to employ new talents from outside. Upskilling the development teams in-house will involve investment in functionality development, architectural interplay and other capabilities.

To be excellent at what you do, you would also need to invest in tooling. The need for investment is because once you have the needed skilled teams who have welcomed the new architectural-design paradigm, you will need that enhanced capacity to go serverless throughout your company. However, you must note that many successful companies use the investment in tooling and in-house tech teams to obtain serverless and SaaS components and integrate additional features.

Set out Clear Integration Processes and Plans

A combination of Open source, SaaS, and serverless requires that your teams clearly understand how to manage and Integrate with the existing assets and service providers. Hence, you have to set up a clear integration plan that your team will efficiently work with while making the existing assets work in sync with the serverless architecture. An automated provision of provider services is needed to ensure events, fine-grained controls and endpoints.

Secure-by-design Security

Starting from the first day of adoption, it is important that as the company combines serverless with SaaS and Open-source, it makes provision against accidental exposure to risks. Hence, there is the need to adopt advanced secure-by-design cloud principles. The principles include the following;

Protecting serverless architecture in the public cloud by keeping its workloads with segmented granular accounts and reducing exposure using blast -radius architecture.
Reimaging authentication by using ephemeral credentials.
Securing your availability in a serverless architecture by using larger perimeter security that deploys internal and public functions at secure gateways
Upgrading and updating governance, risk assessment, and awareness by using DevSecOps pipeline to deploy all serverless workloads, using policy as code for the codification among others

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Final Takeaway

The combination of these three approaches; Open sources, SaaS and serverless, is a consuming paradigm shift that will offer its users many advantages and opportunities as they deploy software and applications using the combination of technologies. While you might be considering the disadvantages that come with it, be rest assured that the benefits outweigh the little drawbacks and disadvantages.