GCP – SaaS delivery made easy: Meet SaaS Runtime

The demand for software as a service (SaaS) based solutions is exploding, fueled by AI-driven hyper-personalization, the rise of specialized vertical solutions, and a no-code revolution. However, building and scaling a successful SaaS can be daunting for would-be SaaS providers. Challenges include difficulty in creating personalized experiences, management complexity across thousands of instances, and dealing with diverse infrastructure to meet performance and reliability goals. These operational burdens often distract from what matters most: innovating and delivering exceptional customer experiences.

At Google Cloud Next 25, we announced the preview of SaaS Runtime, a fully managed Google Cloud service management platform for SaaS providers to simplify and automate the complexities of infrastructure operations, empowering them to focus on their core business. Based on our own internal platform for serving millions of users across multiple tenants, SaaS Runtime leverages our extensive experience managing services at Google scale. SaaS Runtime helps you model your SaaS environment, accelerates deployments, and streamlines operations with a rich set of tools to manage at scale, with automation at its core.

With SaaS Runtime, our vision is for software providers to be able to:

• Launch quickly, customize and iterate: SaaS Runtime empowers you with pre-built customizable blueprints, allowing for rapid iteration and deployment. You can easily integrate AI architecture blueprints into existing systems through simple data model abstractions.

• Automate operations, observe and scale tenants: As a fully managed service, SaaS Runtime allows automation at scale. Starting from your current continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, onboard to SaaS Runtime and then scale it to simplify service management, tenant observability and operations across both cloud and edge environments.

• Integrate, optimize and expand rapidly: SaaS Runtime is deeply integrated into the Google Cloud ecosystem. Developers can design applications with the new Application Design Center, offer them in Google Cloud Marketplace, and once they are deployed across tenants, monitor their performance with Cloud Observability and App Hub. This integrated approach offers developers a unified, application-layer view that’s enriched with full business context, facilitating rapid integration, optimization, and scaling.

How SaaS Runtime works: Model, Deploy, Operate

SaaS Runtime simplifies SaaS lifecycle management through a streamlined, three-step process: Model, Deploy, and Operate.

Imagine you have an Inventory Management Application (IMS) that you want to offer as SaaS to enable retail businesses, so they can optimize stock, predict demand, and reduce waste across each of their stores. As a SaaS provider, you want to provide pricing tiers and augment your application with AI capabilities. Let’s look at how to do that on Google Cloud.

1. Model

As the SaaS provider, you can start by defining or importing the SaaS architecture using SaaS Runtime’s opinionated data model. SaaS providers who are looking to use SaaS Runtime to scale can re-use their existing architecture by using Saas Runtime’s opinionated model framework, which lets you package components that deploy and update together into separate blueprints. This structured approach abstracts the complexities of the application and infrastructure, so you can optimize for performance and reliability. 

First, create a Blueprint by importing Terraform modules via popular source repositories (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket). These blueprints act as the building blocks for the SaaS product, and make it easy to scale to thousands of tenant instances.

For our Inventory Management SaaS scenario, to enable independent deployments and rapid iteration, you’d employ a layered, two-blueprint structure: a base infrastructure blueprint, and a dependent IMS application blueprint. While this example uses two blueprints, SaaS Runtime’s composable blueprint model allows for flexible, customized groupings and dependencies so you can meet diverse business goals, with reliability at its core.

2. Deploy

SaaS Runtime automates provisioning and orchestrating blueprints, helping to ensure that they are consistent and reliable. In order to deploy the Inventory Management SaaS, SaaS Runtime creates two releases — one each for the Base and IMS blueprints. 

As the SaaS provider, you can now provision an instance of Inventory Management SaaS (Tenant Instance) for each retailer by using the releases you created, each with the necessary personalization for each retailer.

3. Operate

SaaS Runtime’s comprehensive service management tools allow you as the SaaS provider to manage, observe and optimize your SaaS operations. These tools let you: 

• Roll out existing releases at scale – In order to roll out the Base and IMS releases to all the retailers, use the rollout capability. Select each release one at a time and roll out to all tenants at once. Alternately, you can roll out to one region at a time, for safer and more reliable rollouts.
• Roll out new releases – To roll out an update to the Inventory Management SaaS application with a new AI capability such as Dynamic Pricing Optimization, create a new AI blueprint that depends on the IMS blueprint. Create a new release that is rolled out to all or selected retailer tenants.

• Roll out new features with Feature Flag configuration – To roll out a new feature such as promotional pricing to select retailer tenants, use SaaS Runtime’s Feature Flag capability. You can enable the feature by changing the configuration for the “PromoPricing” flag to true without rolling out a new binary update.

• Proactively monitor and control progress of rollouts and deployments – You can also dry-run your rollout across a small number of instances of your SaaS to validate its functionality and reliability before rolling it out across all your tenants. Additionally, you can observe the progress of your rollouts across all the regions and tenants. If there are issues during the rollout, you can always pause or resume the rollout, or even cancel the rollout, roll back, or decide to roll out at another time.

Get started today

SaaS Runtime lets software providers innovate and scale SaaS offerings quickly. With it, you can build sophisticated SaaS, such as our Inventory Management Application example using a streamlined three-step process.The platform’s composable blueprint model allows for independent development and rapid iteration of each layer. Deployment of these blueprints enables tailored experiences for individual tenants. Finally, SaaS Runtime simplifies operational complexity at scale, offering precise control over version and feature rollouts across diverse tenant populations.

Google Cloud’s SaaS Runtime is available in preview to simplify and automate your SaaS management. Watch the recording of the presentation from Google Cloud Next 25.

Join our launch partners by visiting our product page to learn more or try it out on the Cloud console and accelerate your SaaS transformation today.