Open-Source AWS SaaS Boost Now Available on GitHub

‘At NTT DATA we’ve had the opportunity to work with a pre-release version and found that it delivers on its promise to accelerate the transition to a SaaS model,’ says Matt Buchner, lead solution architect for the Plano, Tex.-based digital business and IT services provider. ‘This benefits our clients as they can now move more quickly to enable new digital business models that, in turn, allow them to meet their customers’ needs faster.’

AWS SaaS Boost, an open-source tool for accelerating software-as-a-service (SaaS) migrations for independent software vendors (ISVs), is now publicly available on GitHub, the open-source code repository service.

Amazon Web Services said it’s fielded interest from hundreds of software developers since AWS SaaS Boost was announced in preview at December’s AWS re:Invent 2020 conference as a tool to help them migrate their existing software solutions to SaaS delivery models.

“We 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 modernizing enterprise software of behalf of customers,” Adrian De Luca, head of worldwide partner solution architecture and global ISV build programs at AWS, said in a blog post today.

De Luca likened AWS SaaS Boost to 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,” he said.

AWS SaaS Boost provides the needed foundational capabilities to onboard users, provision infrastructure for tenants, monitor consumption trends, configure tenant profiles, integrate with a billing system and surface key metrics with only environment configuration effort required to begin, according to AWS.

“These functions are critical for helping SaaS providers to scale,” De Luca said. “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 also has integrated services including AWS CloudFormation, AWS Identity and Access Management, Amazon Route 53, Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Lambda and Amazon Elastic Container Service so that software products provide security and isolation.

Since AWS SaaS Boost has been released under the Apache-2.0 license, the code can be customized to meet users’ businesses requirements and redistributed as needed.

“Through hundreds of engagements with SaaS builders, we have learned that capabilities such as tenant isolation, data partitioning, monitoring, metering and billing are foundational, and we have developed useful architectural patterns,” De Luca said. “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.”

SaaS is gaining a lot of traction with ISV clients of NTT DATA Services, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, because it removes technical debt while allowing them to offer their customers greater availability and scalability, according to Matt Buchner, lead solution architect for the Plano, Tex.-based digital business and IT services provider.

“While this sounds great, moving a monolith to a SaaS model has traditionally been a fair amount of work,” Buchner said. “AWS SaaS Boost takes that challenge head on. At NTT DATA, we’ve had the opportunity to work with a pre-release version and found that it delivers on its promise to accelerate the transition to a SaaS model. This benefits our clients, as they can now move more quickly to enable new digital business models that, in turn, allow them to meet their customers’ needs faster.”

NTT DATA used AWS SaaS Boost for a client that wanted to move its monolith application to AWS.

“Not only did SaaS Boost accelerate the process – we were able to deploy the newly built SaaS app in a fraction of the time that it took us to manually build a similar solution for another client -- but with it, we were able to take advantage of cloud architecture opportunities, e.g. creating and managing the application as a multi-tenant SaaS app,” Buchner said.

AWS has proposed a charter and guiding principles for AWS SaaS Boost development.

“We’d like to build a vibrant community of developers using AWS SaaS Boost for production workloads and contributors donating code to enhance and optimize its feature,” De Luca said. “As the project matures, we plan to invite other maintainers to take active roles in determining the project’s direction.”