Keynote: Gwen Shapira, Nile - Modern SaaS is Real-Time SaaS | RTA Summit 2023

An executive asked you for a real-time dashboard for your company metrics? Be careful, it may be a trap. The real value of real-time data lies outside the C-suite, in the hands of users who need real-time data for real-time decisions and action.

This is nowhere more apparent than in the evolving architectures of leading SaaS applications such as Notion, GitHub or LinkedIn. They provide a data-rich user experience that users have learned to expect.

Gwen is the co-founder of Nile, where she and her team are trying to make it easier to build world-class SaaS. In her keynote, she’ll take a tour of how the SaaS landscape evolved and show examples of products that put real-time data front-and-center. She’ll share some of the architectures she’s seen teams develop to deliver these insights, and point out the architectures that break in painful ways vs the ones that are actually proving themselves in this next generation of applications already being built.

Transcript

1. Modern SaaS is Real-Time SaaS Gwen Shapira
2. We’ll Talk About Who needs real time analytics? SaaS Use-Cases Architectures
3. WHO NEEDS REAL-TIME ANALYTICS?
4. Real-Time Capabilities Fresh Responsive Slice and Dice Accurate
5. Real-Time Capabilities BI analysts and internal business units don’t need real-time data Data drives decisions and actions. Business strategy doesn’t change every 20ms
6. Real-Time Capabilities Your *customers* need real-time data They are collaborating in real time They can react fast and need to They want to trust you
7. “In God we trust, all others vendors must bring data.” W. Edward Deming
8. MODERN SAAS
9. 2015-2017 2010-2013 2006 1996 1960 1999
10. SaaS is not: “Run an app on someone else’s computer”
11. Consistent low latency is table stakes.
12. Security and Compliance are table stakes.
13. Real-Time Collaboration From “run the app” to multi-tenant to real-time collaboration
14. Data Driven Experience • Personalized • In-app metrics • Usage based billing • Data Features
19. ARCHITECTURE
20. External Dashboards are Deceptively Simple… Production DB
21. Is this it? DWH ETL APIs Query
22. “A Database can’t do everything but a data platform could” Sriram Subraminian, CEO of Stealth Startup
23. Reverse ETL: Common Pattern with Downsides Big Data Lake House ?? APIs Kafka Serving K/V Store
24. Analytics DB Designed for Real-Time Analytics in Production
25. Production Data Platform with Real-Time Analytics Analytics DB Secure Data Access Layer Service Service Service Queries APIs RDBMS Kafka Kafka
26. Summary Your *Customers* Need Real-Time Data Modern SaaS: Collaborative and Data-Rich Requires a Production Data Platform
27. Thank You for Attending! @gwenshap gwen@thenile.dev