Case StudySaas Architecture Assessment
About This Project
Full Spectrum partnered with a company that had acquired several applications serving the clinical trials space. Their goal was to pivot from a customer-hosted model to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), with the company hosting a multi-tenant version of their software in the public cloud. The changing needs for scale with this model, made more complex by decades old software architecture, created challenges and uncertainty around the long-term success of their initiative. Full Spectrum performed a detailed analysis of their software and cloud architecture, underlying code, and DevOps practices to recommend a technical roadmap prioritized to deliver maximum business value upfront.
- Challenges
- Approach & Solution
- Outcomes
• The existing software architecture was built for a single-tenant customer-hosted model.
• The application had evolved over many years, relying on architectural patterns not suited for a cloud-hosted SaaS solution.
• Operating as a multi-tenant solution had created “noisy neighbor” complaints, as one customer’s actions would affect performance across shared resources.
• Development teams were continually chasing customer complaints, relying on intuition to find solutions.
• Full Spectrum reviewed the software and cloud architectures and proposed a reference architecture to resolve performance bottlenecks hindering full-scale adoption of the SaaS solution.
• Full Spectrum analyzed the code base to identify technical debt and estimate the level of effort needed to implement architectural changes.
• Full Spectrum demonstrated to the client how to better leverage performance monitoring tools to identify the root cause of customer complaints.
• Full Spectrum collaborated with the client’s stakeholder team to create a roadmap yielding key results early, focusing on low cost, high return initiatives.
• The client has begun several initiatives to implement architectural changes needed to mitigate key performance issues.
• Improved monitoring and logging led to more accurate root cause analysis, facilitating defect and complaint resolution.
• The client is following the recommended reference architecture to implement new functionality without adding technical debt.