Access Control: a customer-centric approach by SaaS for Developers

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Access Control: a customer-centric approach
Access control is a vast and complex space. Dan Norwood will be our expert guide and take us from first steps all the way to advanced scenarios. We start with overview of the popular approaches, match them with customer requirements, learned how to integrate access control in existing architectures and then explore how a good product design can take access control from "must have" to a delightful customer experience.
49:15
My Job is to Predict the Future
Sam Ramji is an odd duck. He is full of curiosity, insights and ideas. He is also is the Chief Strategy Officer of Datastax.  In the most wide-ranging conversation I've ever recorded, we discussed the most interesting ideas in computing. From the 1980s - all the way to 2032.   Along the way you'll learn how to craft a career as an odd duck with talent for strategy, how to transform an organization, how to create a strategy, and you'll hear 3 future predictions and 3 big data trends that are happening right now.   Related links: - The data architecture video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovWiOD6AG78 - Sam's Podcast: https://www.datastax.com/resources/podcast/open-source-data - Hacking SaaS, the latest and greatest of everything developers need to know when building SaaS: https://hackingsaas.substack.com/ - SaaS Community Slack, join the conversation! https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas 00:00 - Intro: Ducks and curiosity  2:43 - Brief history of computing  6:00 - Career as an odd duck  8:00 - Product Management  12:20 - Microsoft, you have a SaaS problem  20:00 - Clouds, APIs and scale  28:45 - How do we think together  29:53 - APIs are eating the world  33:00 - Advice for engineers in a transforming company  43:40 - The Developer Experience Architect  45:00 - How to Strategy  56:10 - 3 Futuristic Predictions   01:02:47 - 3 Trends in Data  1:14:37 - D&D 5th Edition
01:15:23
Infra SaaS Architecture - the hard parts
In a recent blog post (https://docs.thenile.dev/blog/saas-is...) we gave a long list of reasons why building a control plane for Infra SaaS is tricky. In this video, we walk through an example - from requirements to design, and illustrate why things are always harder than they first appear.
41:59
Building Data Products in 9 Minutes
Building Infra SaaS? Love control planes? - Ping me by email: gwen@thenile.dev or join the community and continue the conversation https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas.   Data Products are trendy, and all tech trends lead to a mess around what it even means and how different products fit in. This is a "highlights" version of my YOW! Data 2022 keynote. I included some of the key insights here, and the longer version includes all the details on the data architectures you need for each type of data product.
08:56
Reverse ETL - Why is it a big deal?
Reverse ETL is a bit of a buzzword these days. But why?   In this video Gwen Shapira discusses the new capabilities that reverse ETL introduces to businesses, and especially B2B SaaS with product-lead growth strategy. She also discusses why reverse ETL is more challenging to implement than you may imagine and why stream processing platforms may  be a key part of solving these challenges. Reverse ETL is not for everyone - but after watching this video, you'll know why everyone is talking about it.
21:02
SaaS Growth Teams - Hack Your Way to Success
Growth teams are cross-functional teams that have a clear goal - help customers get value from a SaaS service by improving the product itself. Great growth teams are metrics-driven and obsessed with the user experience. They optimize to experiment, learn and iterate fast.    In this episode, I interviewed Laura Brouckman, the engineering leader of Confluent Cloud's growth team - about the value that growth teams bring to the right companies, the team culture that leads to success and the hardest challenges that they are facing (hint: data is the problem, and the solution).   Growth engineering sounds fun? Laura is hiring: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-brouckman-792a41aa/  Want more SaaS engineering conversations? Join our Slack: https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas   
30:11
Elasticity Matters - Designing a Serverless SaaS
The best cloud experience is a serverless experience. Billing is usage-based, and services scale automatically based on demand - reducing costs and the operational burden for most use-cases. Building a great user experience for serverless platforms is not easy - you need a great architecture and a bit of magic to pull it off.    Tune in for API design tips, architecture patterns, and Kubernetes gotchas that the Elasticity team at Confluent Cloud Control Plane learned while building a serverless user experience. Straight talk from Prachetaa, technical leader of the Elasticity team, and Ajit, staff engineer on the team.  Interested in more SaaS? Join our Slack:  https://saas-community.github.io/
49:34
Speed of Apache Pinot - Cost of Cloud Storage
Companies that take existing software and manage it in the cloud have the opportunity to rethink their architecture and use cloud services appropriately. The resulting system is often cheaper, simpler, more elastic, and more manageable.    Neha Pawar, a founding engineer at StarTree Data and a PMC member of Apache Pinot, recently published a blog post about her experiments with tiered storage for Pinot. We had an in-depth conversation about how they approached the architecture change and the challenges of achieving reasonable latencies with cloud object storage like S3.   And the big question: Why did otherwise reasonable engineers decide to tackle this project's prototype over a weekend?   Interested in more SaaS? Join our Slack:  https://saas-community.github.io/  The blog post: https://www.startree.ai/blogs/introducing-tiered-storage Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/KishoreBytes/status/1503075370240659462
41:30
Wix on Wix - Story of Scale, Efficiency and Extreme Dogfooding
Can you use your product while you are building it? What is one architecture trick that makes serverless easy? How do you build a call center in two weeks? And what is the right number of managers for a team? I invited Yoav Abrahami, chief architect at Wix, to tell the SaaS Developer Community how Wix uses Wix products to build other Wix products. We've ended up covering a lot of great topics: How large Wix really is The benefits of running on 3 clouds Key insight that allowed Wix to build a cheap and resilient serverless backend The right way to dogfood your product Building a callcenter in 2 weeks and even few leadership tips Interested in more SaaS? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
01:04:38
Get Metering Right - Stories of Usage Based Billing
Puneet and Lior from Amberflo share the story how and why AWS decided to price S3 with usage based billing. We also learn what is metering, how it is different from monitoring and why it matters. And finally, practical tips on how to implement metering and apply a usage-based pricing strategy.
44:30
Migrating to Kubernetes - reasons and lessons
Migrating from a simple, working, homegrown orchestration to Kubernetes. Why would you do that? And what will you learn once you do?  Gianluca, now engineer at Aerosearch, shares stories from his time at InfluxDB, when they migrated their cloud to K8s. He tells the story, and shares important advice on learning, advocating, making tradeoffs and even the secret to hiring great engineers.   Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
40:37
SaaS Stories: User Experience for Metrics and Notifications
Users of Infrastructure SaaS expect to see metrics and receive notifications about the state of the system. But what metrics to expose? Who do you notify? And how to avoid oversharing?  This videos are packed with useful tips by Dustin Cote, product manager at Confluent who spent 3 years figuring this out. We start by talking about metrics, and then switch to notifications at around minute 18:00.   Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
33:09
What is a High Quality Product?
We know quality when we see it, but what makes a product truly great? And what does it take to build a great product?   In this video, Gwen shares her view of what makes products great, gives examples of great products, and shares some tips on how to build one.    Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/  Quality links:  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0063HC7EQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 Creating unique user experiences: https://www.amazon.com/Badass-Making-Awesome-Kathy-Sierra/dp/1491919019 Control charts, like SLO, but more flexible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_chart Statistical tools for quality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_basic_tools_of_quality
18:13
SaaS Stories: The road to self-serve provisioning
You log in to Confluent Cloud, you click on "create cluster" and soon after the cluster shows up, the UI shows a nice message, an email arrives in your mailbox with details about the cluster and the usage of the cluster shows up in your next credit card statement. It is a nice and smooth experience.   In this video, our guest, Ram Subramanian, former VP of Eng at Confluent discussed what actually happens behind the scenes and what it took to build this great user experience.    This is the first video in our new "SaaS Stories" series. Let me know if you want to share your story on our channel.    Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/ Willing to help my product discovery efforts? https://forms.gle/k3Rai3af1BN6D8c2A
35:08
It is an API Economy and SaaS products can join
API Economy is booming and provides many services that make SaaS development easier. Adding great public APIs to your product is also easier than ever.    In this episode, Gwen Shapira, usually the host of the channel, shared everything she learned about APIs, API Economy, and building great public APIs in the last week.    Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/ Willing to help my product discovery efforts? https://forms.gle/k3Rai3af1BN6D8c2A  Great links I found in my API research:  Very detailed writeup from a business perspective: https://www.notboring.co/p/apis-all-the-way-down  A great podcast episode about SaaS in general with good insights about API economy: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0kEiIDcv1i2OzIEi2xuRI7?si=nnPEE4fURTidQy0NNnrwdw&nd=1  The contrarian take: https://www.swyx.io/api-economy/  Jamstack - using the API economy to get away with no backend: https://jamstack.org/  World of APIs: https://www.postman.com/explore  Swagger example of generating docs and examples from a spec: https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis/AnaMCD-lab/my-petstore/1.0.0#/pet/addPet
17:33
Why and How of Consumption Based Billing
Modern SaaS applications increasingly turn to consumption-based billing - a payment scheme in which customers pay based on resources used. This flexible billing is very popular with users but can be challenging to implement. Metronome CTO, Scott Woody, joined us to explain why usage-based billing is so crucial for the SaaS business model - and what it takes to get it right.   Highlights include: - The essential requirements that billing engineers must always support for consumption-based billing - and why they make the implementation so challenging. - The ideal user experience for the two types of users who receive the bill. - What billing and observability have in common, and why it matters. - Why consumption-based billing is almost a must-have for product-led growth. Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
44:46
Pricing & Packaging - What the best SaaS companies get right about them? with Adil Aijaz
In the three years spanning 2018–2020, at least thirty-nine SaaS companies filed for IPO. These companies are the top 1% of SaaS companies. In this talk, I will cover the common GTM, pricing, and packaging strategies used by these companies, emphasizing developer-focused SaaS IPOs. If you are an entrepreneur or an executive at an early-stage startup (seed - Series B), this talk will be valuable for you. About Adil Aijaz, in his own words: I am a data scientist by education, engineering by training. After building data products at Yahoo!, LinkedIn, and RelateIQ, I founded Split Software, a feature flagging and experimentation company that helps engineering teams iterate faster and safer. I served as Split’s CEO for five years, taking it from zero to hundreds of customers. This transition from engineer to entrepreneur taught me a lot about business and SaaS. I write about building SaaS businesses at Medium. https://adilaijaz.medium.com/ Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/
55:18