7 DevOps Best Practices For Launching A SaaS Platform

You need to setup DevOps in a very specific way if you want to build and deploy a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that's easy to maintain. If you don't think carefully about this, your releases are going to be much more stressful, you won't be able to spot crucial bugs and you'll lose insight into the health of your application. As a result, your customers are going to be unhappy and ultimately your product might very well fail.

In this video, I share 7 things you can do to avoid that. It's based on my own experience developing at least three Software-as-a-Service platforms and setting up DevOps for my company. Make sure to watch the video till the end, because I included a few bonus tips to help make releases less stressful.

Resources:

🎓 Courses:

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👀 Code reviewers:
- Yoriz
- Ryan Laursen
- Sybren A. Stüvel
- Dale Hagglund

🔖 Chapters:
0:00 Intro
2:24 The twelve factor app
3:12 1. Use a version control system
4:59 2. Make dependencies explicit
7:07 3. Store config settings in the environment
9:58 4. Separate build and run stages
11:58 5. Distinguish between stateful and stateless services
13:53 6. Quick startup and graceful shutdown
15:45 7. Make sure deploys are as similar as possible
16:29 Bonus tip #1: keep your releases small
17:29 Bonus tip #2: use a staging environment
18:07 Bonus tip #3: don’t do small improvements right before the release

#arjancodes #softwaredesign #python

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[senX]

Man your videos are so high value. You're really "underwatched". Im 6 month into my education to a developer now, though my company lacks senior developers who're up to date on all the modern topics you introduce. Appreciate it, wish i had a mentor like you!

[iZwag]

I really like both these videos were you zoom out a bit and talk about design and architecture topics, but also the videos you make such as code smells and code roasts were you go down into detail. This video really hit it on the nail for my personal hobby project where I am making a really niche SaaS app. I also enjoy your appearance and ability to convey knowledge - just the right mix of nerdy, witty, educational and down to earth. Fist bump from Norway!

[comedyclub]

The points you are talking about are very important and valuable. And not only for SaaS products. Most of the points still hold for other software, too.

[giuliomomente]

Golden content as always.

My personal tip: Dont release on a Friday. Just dont.

[jordansilke]

Excellent video full of pragmatic advice that generalizes well! I wish I'd heard bonus tip #3 earlier in my career.

[lofmaan]

"Don't don small improvement right before the release", this is a solid one, I have had learnt this lesson in hard way, lol 🤣

[janikn]

Very strong recommendation to develop in containers and deploy too. No need to tinker with local conf/dependency horror. Nice video!

[dnxtspm]

Hello Arjan! I've discovered your channel few months ago and I'm still enjoying content. YouTube is overloaded with videos for complete newbies. I'm junior developer and I was looking for information that will be helpful for me. Your content on software design tips really helps me to write better code. You have really interesting videos! It would be great if you will update your channel with some more practical videos about code testing.
Thanks!

[rustyanvil]

Outstanding coding channel. Interesting and relevant topics, clear and concise explanations, engaging presentation, clearly a deep knowledge base of presented topics, and my favorite - no unnecessary dialogue - everything you say is relevant to the topic.

[vascodev]

Ik ben zelf op t moment bezig met de stack op zetten voor een SaaS bedrijf waar ik werk, en heb echt nog veel dingen geleerd van jou ervaring die je deelt💪🏼 Keep up the good work!

[DesktopChronicles]

The .env file is actually a very valid point and option. Recently, I started building an API and we had to deploy it in Digital Ocean’s app platform from the repo. To properly protect the env file we ignored it from git and we used the env variables from the app platform instead. Awesome video, thanks for the great content.

[mrswats]

Poetry FTW. Has been a wonderful tool since I learned about it. And after some years in the software industry I find all of these so true and very good advice!

[oncedidactic]

Great video thanks Arjan :)

A bit conversational in style, yes, but not wordy at all. Your info is pretty dense even while it's smooth 👌👌

[holographictheory]

As always, excellent and insightful video, thank you! I have a minor note about the editing: personally I can't do the slow zooming in very often. Once or twice a video for emphasis has been totally fine, but this amount was too high. Also, really like the setup! The colors you have going on are really great. Thank you so much again for your work here on youtube; you've really helped me become a much better developer and are, hands down, the highest quality development educator that I've ever seen!

[ThePaulWilliams]

Fantastic overview, Arjan. Keep up the great work!

[conceptrat]

Aaah yes the memories. Old WordPerfect 4.2. I remember selling IBM XT and ATs with Double Dos/Dos Carousel and then training people to use WordPerfect as well as Lotus 123 and dBASE.
Crazy where we are now.

[ThanatosCG]

Incredibly insightfull as always. Never heard of code toggle/switch before. Also, tip #3 resonates with me, hard, as i (against my best thinking) made this precise mistake a week ago.

[devmishra]

Super helpful! More content on Docker, CI/CD (Jenkins/ GitHub Actions), organizing python project which has external third part dependencies, would also be helpful!
Thank you!

[jeremietranape]

This video was amazing. I will need to watch it a couple of times to get everything I need. A lot of abstract concepts for me. I know it is difficult but would be great to have some more visualization to understand how things play together. Even some whiteboard drawings would help a lot.

[bwill]

Oh man the small improvements tip is so important. I've made that mistake way too many times.