Integrate existing stack¶
If you haven't started building your SaaS offering, you can directly build your SaaS control plane with Omnistrate.
However, if you have already built your initial SaaS offering, you can use Omnistrate to extend your current offering to offer even more value. There are a few common ways that our customers extend their current offerings and we will discuss each of those best practices here.
Extending your SaaS to other usecases (vertical integration)¶
The old and traditional way is to continue to hire engineers and reinvent the wheel, or you can switch to Omnistrate platform and solve all of the undifferentiated problems at a fraction of the cost.
Here are some of the possible use-cases that you may want to extend your SaaS:
- Go Multi-cloud: You have built the SaaS for AWS or one of the cloud providers and trying to go multi-cloud
- Add BYOA support: You have built a SaaS deploying everything in your account but you want to deploy your tech stack in your customers account
- Add more service plans: You have built a dedicated offering but want to extend it to other offerings (Multi-Tenant or Serverless)
- Go Global: You have built your SaaS in one or two regions but you want to now scale to 130+ regions across major cloud providers or good subset of them
- Add new services: You want to extend your SaaS with new product offerings but the cost to hire or extend your current SaaS is too much
- Operational cost: You have hired 100's of engineers to operate your SaaS at scale and you want to improve your margins by 10x by moving your existing offering
Now, you may have already built something and want to keep it running for your existing customers. Well, one of the architectural pattern that many of our customers used is SaaS gateway pattern.
Basically, in this pattern, you keep your UI and the API interface as it is, and simply call Omnistrate generated APIs to add support for clouds/regions/BYOA/serverless etc for your SaaS.
Here is a pictorial view of some of the above options:
That's great but you may be wondering, how will I integrate:
- Authentication: we suggest that you continue to use your existing authentication mechanism and so don't have to worry about this layer at all.
- Authorization: if you already have an access control, you can continue to use your access control and only call your Omnistrate-based SaaS APIs for all the deployment and management operations, when the access is granted.
- Auditing: we will audit all of your control plane operations. You can call our APIs to get a list of events for any tenant or resources, and append it to your existing auditing mechanism.
- Metrics/Logging: we integrate with common Observability vendors and allow you to continue to leverage them without any extra effort.
- Alerting: we seamlessly integrate with PagerDuty today and provide you alerting out of the box.
- Billing: If you have already built a billing pipeline, we can send you the aggregated metering records for your pipeline to consume. Alternatively, we can take care of end to end billing.
- Continuous Integration: You may already have or using a CI system. We can directly integrate with your existing CI system. You can then release your new software to your existing SaaS stack and Omnistrate-based stack at the same time.
As an example, one of the companies who already had the cloud and a large team to operate the cloud. They wanted to launch a new service and their estimates were a dozen of engineers for 1 year just to build MVP. We were able to get them live in no time using the above architecture and integrate with their existing offering.
According to their SVP of engineering "Partnering with Omnistrate was a pivotal decision for our SaaS project. Their offering not only expedited our development process but also ensured a timely launch, allowing us to capitalize on a crucial market opportunity.".
If you have any questions on integration challenges your SaaS control plane, please reach out to us at support@omnistrate.com and one of the core technical team member would love to discuss it in more detail and share the best practices.
Extend your SaaS architecture (horizontal integration)¶
In this integration, instead of extending your SaaS to other business use-cases, you can offload parts of SaaS control plane to Omnistrate. There are primarily 5 layers:
- Tenant management: this layer is responsible for managing tenants, ex- authentication, authorization, UX - API/CLI/UI, auditing, tenant provisioning and management, tenant isolation
- Application management: this layer is responsible for managing application from scaling, patching, to extending application capabilities like multi-zone placement, IP whitelisting etc.
- Infra management: this layer is responsible for building and operating infrastructure components, ex- compute, storage, networking, load-balancers, certificates, routing, DNS, K8s, infra-security and policies, cloud-accounts, infra-observability, infra-evolution, infra-upgrades etc.
- Commerce management: this layer is responsible for metering and billing your customers.
- Operational management: this layer is responsible for the operational management of your customers.
Custom Tenant Management layer¶
If you would like to maintain your own tenant-management layer, you can ignore all the tenant-management APIs that we generated and just use your control plane APIs to build/operate service/infra layers.
Custom Application Management layer¶
One of the typical mechanism to build application management layer is using the K8s operator framework.
Let's say you already have an K8s Operator that defines setup, perform upgrades, take backups, manage scaling etc. and you want to use your Operator to build your SaaS. You can offload the other layers to us by bringing your own operator and we will skip application management.
To build and operate your SaaS, you will still need the other SaaS layers beyond K8s operator to manage infrastructure, add SaaS capabilities, enable SaaS integrations, automate day-2 operations etc. For more details, see this page.
As an example, one of the companies already had an operator and wanted to continue to use that. They wanted to launch their SaaS offering and decided to use Omnistrate for everything else.
Custom Infrastructure Management layer¶
If you already have Terraform scripts (or other setup) and prefer to maintain that yourself, you can offload the other layers to us and we will skip creating/managing infrastructure.
Custom Commerce Management layer¶
You can integrate with billing provider of your choice and don't have to use any of our integrations. To learn more, please see this
Custom Operational Management layer¶
If you would like to automate your day-2 operations outside Omnistrate, you can simply build and manage your SaaS offering with Omnistrate.
If you have any questions on integration challenges your SaaS control plane, please reach out to us at support@omnistrate.com and one of the core technical team member would love to discuss it in more detail and share the best practices.