Picture credit: Nandor Fejer/Flickr

As AWS increasingly becomes the preferred deployment model for enterprise applications and services, it’s never been more important for a software or AWS SaaS provider to effectively work with AWS.  Many leading technology providers are therefore optimising their software to run on AWS as well as building globally available cloud services delivered through AWS’ worldwide regions.

We’ve had some success on AWS, and thought we’d share some of our learnings in the form of best practices for you to keep in mind when developing your software or SaaS business in this way.

Embrace the change

If you’ve attended the keynote at any recent AWS Summit, you’ve heard the message “cloud is the new normal.”  Our advice is to take this to heart, and invest in your business knowing the momentum behind cloud will only continue to accelerate.

This is a boon to businesses of every size and in every location around the world – cloud makes it easier than ever before to innovate, rapidly bring an offering to market, and serve your customer.

Relentlessly focus on the customer experience

Focusing your business on customer success is a must when building a business on AWS.

Why? Because the number one driving factor behind everything AWS does is help its customers be successful and innovative.  Tactically, this can mean many things for a SaaS Partner, but the one that stands out is building technology integrations that can provide additional value to AWS customers. 

A good example of this involves AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config, services that deliver log data on AWS API calls around user activity and resource changes. When properly harnessed, these services help ensure security and compliance of AWS deployments. A handful of SaaS Partners deliver integrations for these AWS services.  The importance of these integrations is clear when you think of how crucial security and compliance are for any successful AWS deployment.

Leverage your customers in your go-to-market strategy

When it comes to building your software or SaaS business on AWS, nothing beats customer validation.  One of the most compelling stories is when a customer fully integrates your technology into their AWS strategy.

A great example of this is the Federal Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).  FINRA is an independent regulator that examines all securities firms and their registered persons and surveils trading on U.S. markets.  To respond to rapidly changing market dynamics, FINRA is moving its platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to analyse and store approximately 30 billion market events every day.  FINRA uses Splunk Cloud to ensure security and compliance in their AWS deployment.

Choose AWS and go “all-in”

When building out your cloud strategy, you have to make choices.  Our advice: When two roads diverge in the cloud, choose AWS.

This is a best practice because AWS has the richest and broadest set of services in the market.  Whether your offering is storage intensive, computer intensive, or I/O intensive, there are specific solutions for each of them.  Regardless of what you need on the infrastructure stack – whether it’s automated provisioning, configuration or management, there is a mature solution that fits the bill.

In addition, business today is global.  To successfully grow your business you need the ability to rapidly expand around the world. AWS offers that through their 11 worldwide regions.

Leverage the ecosystem

If you’re building on AWS, chances are that other folks building on AWS will find it useful.  This is what makes the AWS announcement of its SaaS Partner Program so exciting.  If you’re building a SaaS billing management solution, odds are we could use it for our SaaS operational and security monitoring solution. Since we’re building a SaaS operational and security monitoring solution, odds are you could use it for your SaaS billing management solution. It’s a win-win for all sides.