How to Choose the Right Technology Stack for SaaS Development?

admin / December 22, 2021

Technology Stack for SaaS Development

One of the most important steps to take while designing a sustainable product or service is to pick the right set of technologies for SaaS development.

Why?

Because a good product is not just about designing an appealing UI and convenient UX; it’s much more beyond that. It’s all about building a stable, secured, and maintainable product that not just wins the hearts of your consumer but also allow you to augment your business. And that’s where the right technology stack matters most.

Being a business owner, busy working on operational activities, and planning a marketing strategy for your new product, you often leave the decision to choose the technology stack on developers. 

Of course, it’s quite a common practice to rely on your development partner’s technology stack decision; however, make sure that your development partner understands your business and takes into accounts all the important features and functionalities while proposing a technology stack.

At Dark Bears, we believe that our client should have a basic understanding of the technology stacks and the frameworks so that we speak the same language while communicating about the project and help reach the goal faster. And that’s why we’ve curated this article for you.

So, without further ado, let’s explore what a technology stack is all about and which technology we work at at Dark Bears to build our product.

Defining the structure of your SaaS product

You might have guessed that a technology stack combines the right software tools and programming languages to bring web or mobile app ideas into existence. Roughly speaking, web and mobile app architecture is segregated into the front end and backend parts, which are client-facing and server as a hidden entity.

Each layer of the app is built atop of each other, forming a stack. It simply means web and mobile tech stacks are heavily dependent on each other to perform operations, each placed below another and thus creating a block of the typical technology stack. 

The Front-end of a SaaS application

The front-end of SaaS development services are those parts that users see and interact with. Majority of the web applications require three main elements for front end functioning:

1. HTML:

HyperText Markup Language is a technology used by developers to structure the content on the web page. Using the latest version, HTML 5, you can easily structure your app’s front-end audio and video content.

2. CSS:

As the name suggests, cascading Style Sheets (CSS) styles the HTML written document in a desirable state. The primary function of a CSS file is to format and style the content to give it a particular look and feel.

3. JavaScript:

The most demanded programming language, JavaScript, allows developers to add interactive elements to the web page. It makes user engagement interesting and attractive.

Today, innumerable tools have emerged as a quick-fix solution to reduce the manual efforts in building front-end for web and mobile. Using a particular framework helps to take care of the page structure, interactive elements, and design in SaaS applications.

E.g., Bootstrap is the most popular HTML framework that reduces the innumerable workload of the developers. In such a way, the JavaScript ecosystem is blessed with so many beautiful frameworks that serve as a ready-made foundation for the app architecture.

4. TypeScript

A superset of JavaScript, Typescript is often used in the front-end toolkit for webpage development. Its type checking feature enables a dynamic approach to program and code structure. As a result, typeScript is a perfect choice if anyone is building complex and multi-tier applications.

Frontend Frameworks

Frontend frameworks are packages with prewritten, standardized code structured in files and folders. They act as a base for developers since it’s wrapped with pretested, functional code to build an app, along with an ability to change the final design. Such frameworks save developers time to write the code from scratch and make the task easier and faster. Be it Angular, Bootstrap, Vue.JS, JQuery, or others, you can choose anyone per your project demand.

The Back-end of a SaaS application

Even though the backend framework doesn’t hold the center stage, it’s the main engine that drives your app and implements the logic inside it. The web server, a part of the backend, accepts the request from the browser, processes these requests as per the coded logic, turns to the database to fetch results, and sends back the relevant content. Thus, the backend consists of a database, server app, and server itself.

1. Database: 

The database is a collection of records. It is generally an aggregation of data, records, and files. There are numerous databases: MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL, with many NoSQL and SQL databases available.

2. Server:

You will likely choose Apache, IIS, and Nginx, which could be running on-premises or in AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, etc.

3. DevOps tools: 

Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Jenkins, ELK stack, Prometheus + Grafana, and others are needed to build Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipelines (CI/CD).

4. AI/ML:

Your SaaS can benefit from in-detail data analytics powered by purpose-built AI algorithms. Such services are available on AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or can be built using a variety of Python, R, or Go libraries if you’re skilled enough.

5. Event brokers: 

Kafka or RabbitMQ help streamline backend events in CQRS architectures, distributed data sources, and other complex backend structures.

6. API:

An API is a bridge to establish a connection between Server and the client. It helps the server pull the data and transfer it to the database. The numerous services we use daily are highly dependent on interconnected APIs. If any of these APIs fail, the service will not function.

All these play a significant role in SaaS development. But choosing the best one isn’t as important as selecting an optimal set of tools for your particular project. This is where Backend-as-a-Service comes forward.

BaaS as a way to speed up time to market

Instead of designing and implementing complex backend systems for your SaaS, you can use BaaS from a specialized managed service provider. This way, you’ll save time and cost by not needing to design, build and maintain such complex software. This will also eliminate the need to hire SaaS developers and retain talents essential to the job, as the BaaS provider will surely do that for you.

Now, have you thought about the architecture of your SaaS? We bet it will be multi-tenant, but you need to learn about the single-tenant approach too.

Software architecture for SaaS development

You can design your own SaaS to run a separate instance for every customer to store data within a single database and separate them on other levels. But there are pros and cons to each of the approaches.

With the single-tenant approach, you dedicate separate computational resources for every customer. Each program runs a separate instance, and there’s no clash to share a memory with other tenants. Though it’s more secure, it requires more resources.

With a multi-tenant approach, your customers can share the same web-based app, database, and/or infrastructure behind it. This is more resource-efficient but requires extra security measures. Besides, this simplifies updates, in-app marketing, A/B testing, and other business processes and activities.

What factors influence the choice of a tech stack for SaaS?

Being a leading SaaS development company, it’s essential to pick the right technology stack, especially when the options are fewer. Below are a few factors that you can consider while choosing the tech stack for your app.

1. Code Maintainability

Going for a popular language and framework combination is a good choice, but it should have strong community support. Think about the future;

Will you have access to the same talents who developed the code in the future?

Will the language and framework used to build the app will be considered legacy?

Think rationally before acting.

2. Scalability requirements

What if you want to extend and improve your SaaS app with the latest technology and features in the upcoming years? 

Will it scale easily?

Angular apps scale much easier than React as Angular was built keeping scalability in mind from the beginning. So, make sure your app is dynamic enough to scale as and when needed.

3. Time to market

The shorter it is, the bigger chances it has to outperform your competitors. So, select the technologies and approaches that boost your software delivery rate through automotive and repetitive operations.

How to choose the best tech stack for a SaaS project?

Choosing the right SaaS tech stack for your business is not as easy as it seems. But, at Darkbears, we recommend going for the simple and reliable technologies and tools available on every layer of the stack. You shouldn’t search out niche tools without LTS support; instead, focus on selecting the most popular technology on the market.

In the end, it’s only your expertise gained over the years of software development that will help define the most relevant SaaS tech stack for every project. This is why Dark bears is happy to help you out with our in-depth expertise and provide consulting on how to choose a tech stack for the SaaS product you plan to build. In addition, we have a pool of talents and experts who can offer its BaaS service to help you develop an app from scratch.

Get in touch today to talk business.


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