Tools you need for SaaS

Tech Choices

  • Ruby on Rails for Web Applications
  • Heroku to deploy
  • GitHub for source control
  • Use Continuous Integration for testing
  • Use PostgreSQL database

Development

  • Store ISO 8601 compliant time and date
  • Monitoring for your server, database
  • Self-service for account deletion
  • Admin technology to sign in as User
  • (Staged) Canary deployment to percentile of your servers (2%, 20%). Canary/Staged Canary to Production could have a 5-minute time window for Engineers to test the change.
  • Feature flags to individual user, group of users, percentile of users

Emails

  • Separate transactional and marketing sender
  • Unsubscribe without login
  • Confirmed opt-in for marketing mails (GDPR)

Production

  • Canary deploy to % of your servers

Finally if your team grows to a point you need to all sorts of data:

  • Read replica of your database