The SAAS development life-cycle

Cloud service development requires a different approach than the traditional software development lifecycle as the cloud provider becomes a critical success factor of the overall project. In a traditional software development setting, more emphasis is put on the functional aspects because it is deployed on an on-premise infrastructure with implicit security, compliance, control, operational transparency and perceived service level requirements. Another important factor is the cost of operations. It often takes back seat, especially in cost centers, due to the sunk cost and horizontal charge models. The main objective of this paper is to focus on the lifecycle aspects of SaaS service development and outline the motivation, inputs and deliverables of each activity for all the phases of the lifecycle. Cloud services can be built for internal consumption as well as for selling to external customers. The focus of this article is the cloud services built for external consumption as these require rigorous architecture practices to incorporate the service tenets necessary for a successful services business model. Even though the SaaS (Software as a Service) Development Lifecycle outlined here is scoped at external facing services, the process can easily be adopted to internal private cloud based applications that target internal users. It is clear that even enterprise IT departments have to start looking at themselves as Service Providers and act accordingly.


The SaaS Development Lifecycle (SaaSDLC) is an adaptation of the traditional iterative software development process with additional important phases added. These additional phases – Evaluation, Subscribing and Operations are less prominent and implicit for on-premise deployments. However, the activities during these phases become critical success factors for a SaaS development and deployment due to an externalized multi-tenant hosting environment. While the initial SaaS projects require more emphasis on the cloud provider evaluation, subscription acquisition and operationalizing the services, the subsequent SaaS efforts can leverage the know-how acquired previously thereby allowing the project teams to short circuit Evaluation and Subscribing phases. The IT Professional needs to be extra diligent in cloud platform provider evaluation, designing the deployment environment and setting up operational processes that integrate cloud providers processes and frameworks into the existing management and monitoring environment.

Read the full article at:
http://www.infoq.com/articles/SaaS-Lifecycle

About the authors:

Hanu Kommalapati is a Senior Technical Director at Microsoft Corporation where he is the technical lead for Windows Azure and Cloud Computing for the U.S. subsidiary of Microsoft's Platform Evangelism organization. In this capacity he works spreading the word about Cloud Computing to Microsoft  customers, partners and community.
In the past he has held positions as Principal Platform Strategy Advisor and as an Architect for Microsoft. Previously he also held positions as a Principal Consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

William H. Zack Is a Microsoft Principal Architect Evangelist who specializes in architecting, implementing and supporting both applications and computing infrastructures based on Microsoft Internet, Intranet, Client/Server and Cloud technologies. Over the past three year years Bill has been evangelizing Windows Azure and working with customers and partners to help them design, build and move applications to the Windows Azure Cloud Platform.