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SE Radio 636: Sriram Panyam on SaaS Control Planes
Sriram Panyam, CTO at DagKnows, discusses SaaS Control Planes with SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath. The discussion starts off with the basics, examining what control planes are and why they're important. Sriram then discusses reasons for building a control plane and the challenges in designing one. They explore design and architectural considerations when building a SaaS control plane, as well as the key differences between a control plane and a data plane. This episode is sponsored by QA Wolf.
Sriram Panyam, CTO at DagKnows, discusses SaaS Control Planes with SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath. The discussion starts off with the basics, examining what control planes are and why they’re important. Sriram then discusses reasons for building a control plane and the challenges in designing one. They explore design and architectural considerations when building a SaaS control plane, as well as the key differences between a control plane and a data plane.
This episode is sponsored by QA Wolf.
Show Notes
- Blog: buildmage.com
- LinkedIn: @SriramPanyam
Related Episodes
- SE Radio 519: Kumar Ramaiyer on Building a SaaS
- SE Radio 499: Uma Chingunde on Building a PaaS
Transcript
Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society. This transcript was automatically generated. To suggest improvements in the text, please contact [email protected] and include the episode number.
Brijesh Ammanath 00:00:51 Welcome to Software Engineering Radio. I’m your host, Brijesh Ammanath. I’m here today with Sriram Panyam to talk about SaaS control planes. Sriram is the CTI diagnose previously, Sriram has grown and supported multiple high performing and deeply technical engineering teams at Google Cloud, LinkedIn, and several startups both in the US and in Australia. Sri, welcome to Software Engineering Radio. Is there anything I missed in your intro that you’d like to add?
Sriram Panyam 00:01:19 Hey, thanks for having me here. No, you were spot on. I’m looking forward to chatting and sharing and learning.
Brijesh Ammanath 00:01:25 Let’s start with a brief definition of SaaS and its growing market importance.
Sriram Panyam 00:01:31 Yeah. So if you think about your favorite applications, especially in the last 20 years, you had the rise of this whole web 2.0 movement. Actually, let’s go back even before that. You had your traditional enterprise applications. Companies would create something, they would deliver it to users. Users would use it usually with long, long development and deployment cycles. It came with its own costs and nuances. And after circa 2005 onwards, there was a rise of the whole lip 2.0 movement. Where applications would be developed in a more agile way, there would be more consumer focused. And obviously, web being the main delivery mechanism meant that companies could iterate faster, collect feedback faster, and delight their users in a much more, iterate faster fashion. Now, I don’t work for Slack. I’m in no way affiliated with Slack, but I find Slack is a very good example of this.
Sriram Panyam 00:02:32 Your typical chatting applications, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, they’re your typical consumer applications. You have one instance as far as the user can see. There’s one giant global instance. You would send messages, you would read messages, you would two other things in those applications. Now, enterprises felt there was a need for those applications within a more closed or bounded domain. How about just messaging within enterprises? How about just messaging maybe within a collection of enterprise or collection of teams? So if you look at Slack, Slack is a classic enterprise SaaS offering or a B2B offering, which is really popular. And it forms a good example of how you differentiate SaaS and non-SaaS offerings. Now, in a SaaS offering, it is really a business model. If you think about what it means to be SaaS, I think there are many definitions, but the key principle is it’s a business model and it’s a delivery model that really is driven by what the business needs.
Sriram Panyam 00:03:40 Technology is common or is used in in most applications. But how is important? One key thing is actually when you want to, I mean a lot of successful companies that offer SaaS products, they believe in the idea that they have to adapt to what the market needs, what the customers need, and what the competition is doing. So a lot of SaaS companies are looking at trying at new pricing models, newer market segments, looking at new customer needs. Now, there’s also the need for onboarding being frictionless. Now, yes, onboarding onto the older or traditional consumer applications was frictionless. You had your Auth, you had your signup sign or login that’s tied to a customer. But here, really your customer is the enterprise. While you may not have freebie and visibility to the end enterprises individual customers, you want to make sure that enterprises themselves can onboard onto your application with the most frictionless way possible.
Sriram Panyam 00:04:44 So this has to be important. You can’t just say, Hey, look, we’ll set up a few boxes with Slack running in a bunch of nodes in your data center manually each time. Can you imagine how long that would take? Can you imagine how long it would take to roll out fixes deploy new, new features? So all this has to be frictionless. And you also have, especially last 10 or so years, regulatory and compliance has been a huge, huge influence in how enterprises want to adopt your offering. In fact, there are so many regulatory environment requirements like sovereign clouds and data residency that demand that their application data compute all reside in a single geography. For example, again, I picked Slack as an example. Slack is owned by Salesforce, which is an American company. Yes, it is global, but it’s headquartered in America.
Sriram Panyam 00:05:42 A government organization in Germany might have strict demands that all instances of Slack are running physically in three or four locations in Germany. So you need to ensure that happens. And again, a lot of the innovation doesn’t just come from the user interface. Those are premium things. There are customer features that do get rolled out, but these kind of compliance enterprise business needs being taken care of is a primary motivation for the innovation. And also the usage scale varies. I think WhatsApp customary competitive offering to Slack, again, not in the same thing, I think does, has about a billion daily active users each sending a thousand, 10,000 messages. I mean, maybe that’s messages a day and they have to be globally available. Like I would have a WhatsApp instance. I would log into WhatsApp, for example, chatting with my family all the way in India or Australia.
Sriram Panyam 00:06:39 And they all have to be available at the same time with something that’s more enterprise like Slack or Slack’s. Enterprise offering those particular global demands could be softened. I might require that my employees are all based in a single geography. So as long as they communicate, I’m good. So these are some of the things that differentiate SaaS versus your traditional consumer offerings and how you build the teams around this. Those are influenced how you build your stack around this that has influenced how you look at metrics, how you look at your product, road mapping, how you look at, I wouldn’t even say culture, like your team culture, all that’s influenced. So that’s why SaaS offerings themselves, SaaS as a business model is growing quite fast. And will be doing so for the next foreseeable future. I think, and these stats keep changing all the time. An interesting stat I found was that in US alone, the SaaS market is around half a trillion annually. And globally, there are between 25 and 50K SaaS companies that are offering various centers services to various enterprises.
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