AWS SaaS Boost released as open source

At re:Invent 2020, Amazon announced the preview of AWS SaaS Boost, an open source tool that helps software developers migrate their existing solutions to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model. Think of AWS SaaS Boost like a space launch system for your applications, with all the ground operation and rockets to help you propel and manage your software as a service in the AWS cloud.

SaaS Boost significantly offloads development effort by accelerating application transformation to SaaS, freeing up software developers to focus on features that differentiate their product. After receiving interest from hundreds of developers in the project, AWS is pleased to announce that from today it will be publicly available on GitHub.

Sharing good patterns and practices

All SaaS products need the foundational capabilities to onboard users, provision infrastructure for tenants, monitor consumption trends, configure tenant profiles, integrate with a billing system, and surface key metrics. These functions are critical for helping SaaS providers to scale. If every SaaS company needed to invest in building these capabilities before building their actual applications, it would consume valuable development resources, thus burning finite capital and slowing down their time to market.

AWS SaaS Boost provides these capabilities with only environment configuration effort required to get started, allowing developers to focus on new features and experiences for their customers. Furthermore, having integrated AWS services such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Route 53, Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to ensure that your product not only use best practices, but also provides security and isolation.

Through hundreds of engagements with SaaS builders, AWS has learned that capabilities such tenant isolation, data partitioning, monitoring, metering, and billing, are foundational, and they have developed useful architectural patterns. Although the need for these elements is universal, the implementation is not. For example, technology dependencies such as databases and file systems are different for each application, metering units change depending on customers, and billing systems differ by geography. Because AWS SaaS Boost was released under the Apache-2.0 license, the code can be customised to meet your businesses requirements and redistributed as needed.

SaaS applications are highly distributed, integrated pieces of software that are constantly evolving. Many of them use industry standard protocols and other open source technologies, such as OAuth for authorisation, Open Policy Agent for control, and OpenTelemetry for observability. They also interface with other SaaS products, for example Ping, Okta, Auth0 for identity, Stripe for billing, and New Relic or Dynatrace for monitoring. The extensibility of AWS SaaS Boost allows users to build connectors to these technologies.

Why open source?

Throughout the preview period with developers all over the world, AWS has received interest from large industry leading software companies who want to offer their traditional products in an easier way, startups who want to build new products with it, and systems integrators modernising enterprise software of behalf of customers. AWS’s objective with AWS SaaS Boost is to get great quality software based on years of experience in the hands of as many developers and companies as possible.

Because SaaS Boost is open source software, anyone can help improve it. Through a community of builders, it is hoped that features will be developed faster, integration with a wide range of SaaS software, and to provide a high quality solution for their customers regardless of company size or location. For these reasons, a charter and a set of guiding principles for SaaS Boost is being proposed.

The main aim is to build a vibrant community of developers using AWS SaaS Boost for production workloads, and contributors donating code to enhance and optimise its features. As the project matures, other maintainers will be invited to take active roles in determining the project’s direction.

Kenneth Chestnut, Global Head of GTM Technology Partnerships at Stripe commented  “Users can quickly customise their pricing models and fully automate payment support using Stripe. We are excited to work with AWS to help power internet businesses globally with the launch of AWS SaaS Boost.”