Developer of Experience after 3.5 years of SAAS and PAAS

The developer experience of most SAAS offerings seems great! We're given slick web UIs, command line tools and sometimes APIs. But what happens to that experience when you start to scale? Spoiler: it's painful :)

Three years ago, my company had two developers and one application with a database both running on Heroku. Today, we have 50+ developers, and 50 applications and services using Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, and Memecache, maintained and monitored by Pager Duty, Librato, UserVoice, Pingdom, and StatusPage. We have no servers of any kind—not even EC2 or other virtualized servers.

The underlying technologies provided by our SAAS partners work great! But the management of these services is a full time job. This talk will be about what it's like, what works, and what doesn't. Developers will learn what they're getting when they start using SAAS products, while SAAS providers and in-house devops engineers will learn some techniques and patterns to make platform management easier on everyone.

Transcript