How to scale your SaaS on AWS: 5 Mistakes to Avoid

AWS offers a wide range of services that can help you scale your SaaS application rapidly and easily. However, making mistakes while scaling can have a negative impact on your business. In this week's series, we will highlight five of the common mistakes that SaaS founders can make while building and scaling their apps on AWS.

Mistake 1: Not investing in automation

One of the most common mistakes that SaaS founders can make is not investing in automation. Automation can help you save time and money while scaling your SaaS application on AWS. Some of the most important areas to focus on when automating are provisioning, managing resources, and monitoring.

Provisioning refers to the process of setting up AWS resources while managing and monitoring refers to keeping track of resource utilization and performance and supporting them. Automating these tasks can help us optimize your SaaS app and keep things under control.

Mistake 2 - Failing to optimize for performance

In order to provide a good user experience, it's important to optimize your SaaS application for performance. AWS offers a wide range of services and options that can help you with that. Not taking advantage of these options can result in poor performance and decreased customer satisfaction.

In particular, you should focus on optimizing your storage, networking, and database choices. For example, if your application relies heavily on disk operations, make sure the size of your I/O operations isn't limiting provisioned IOPS.  Also, you can use AWS CloudFront to distribute and cache your content across the globe.

Mistake 3: Not designing for scale

AWS offers a variety of services that can help you design and scale your SaaS application. When scaling your app on AWS, it's important to choose services that have the ability to grow with your business.

Failing to take advantage of these options can lead to performance and capacity problems as your application grows. In particular, you should make sure to use AWS’s scalable services such as AWS EKS (Kubernetes), S3, and RDS Aurora which provide highly and rapid scalability features.

Mistake 4: Not managing your costs

AWS can be a great platform for launching a SaaS app, but it can also come with some high costs. Managing costs on AWS can be tricky, but with a bit of planning and diligence, you can keep your expenses under control.

For example, choosing the right instance type,  optimizing your resources, taking advantage of discount plans and spot contracts, choosing the right AWS region, avoiding NAT traffic and inter-region communication when not needed, and most important, pro-actively monitoring your AWS bill and resources associated with it.

By avoiding these common pitfalls, you can keep your AWS costs in check and avoid hurting your bottom line.

Mistake 5: Not monitoring your AWS environment

AWS is a complex platform with many components. As your SaaS business grows, it's important to monitor your AWS resources closely. Failing to do so can lead to unexpected costs and performance issues, and even outages.

AWS offers a variety of tools that you can use to monitor your resources, such as Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Trusted Advisor, open-source tools such as Prometheus and Grafana, or third-party services such as DataDog. Monitoring your AWS environment should include tracking pro-actively usage, performance, and health metrics, and continuously improving it.

Conclusion:

AWS is a great platform to build and scale your SaaS application on, but there are some potential pitfalls that you need to avoid. The five common mistakes that Saas founders can make while building and scaling their SaaS application on Amazon Web Services are listed above. If you want to know more about how to avoid these mistakes, or need help getting started with AWS, please contact us today. Our team of certified AWS engineers would be happy to assist you in setting up and running your SaaS business on AWS.

If you want to know more about how to avoid these mistakes, or need help getting started with AWS you might want to check out INFRALESS.

INFRALESS is the first and only subscription service that offers a way for startups to build and scale their SaaS app on AWS without the heavy lifting and the big costs associated with setting and maintaining that up.

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