If there is one thing that all Software as a Service (SaaS) companies understand, it is the pressure of “being fired”, as SPS Commerce’s Andy Domeier puts it. SPS Commerce is a cloud-based supply chain management software company and Andy is a Senior Director of Technology there - so he knows what he is talking about. Part of the core value of buying SaaS solutions is that you are typically buying a subscription, which means that you can also cancel that subscription at some point. That means that SaaS companies that want to survive have to keep their customers happy - or else face the ax.
As Andy explains, the way to achieve this lofty goal of longevity is to move fast and reliably. The hard part about this equation is that those two goals often conflict, which is what gave rise to disciplines like DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). To balance these objectives, we see the adoption of technologies like microservices, cloud, containers, and Kubernetes. While allowing teams to move fast and reliably, these systems also massively increase complexity.
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