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I honestly thought this was satire for the first half of the article. When did working on SaaS products exempt people from understanding how to deliver software? Should we just remove the first [S] from SaaS? I see this attitude a ton in conversations with startups. A founder describes their whiz-bang thing, a question comes up about how this works in larger environments, usually followed by a mumbled reply about virtual appliances. Virtual appliances (and to some extent, docker containers) are not the solution, for so many reason, I might run out of space in the comment field listing them. The short version: OS updates, security updates, networking issues, customer-side diagnostics, size, and support for the customer's specific virtualization platform. Docker is great if your customers all use docker and you have the update process sorted out, but that is probably a small fraction of your total market. In other words, build actual installable software that runs on some set of supported operating systems. Make a DEB, an RPM, maybe an MSI. Build an installer. Have a nifty splash screen. Add desktop links. Don't lose revenue because you can't be bothered to figure out omnibus, nullsoft, or bitrock. If you are building software, keep in mind that customer environments are insane and should be treated as hostile. Every bit of your software and packaging needs to be paranoid, defensive, and respond well to failures. When something goes wrong, customers are not your QA team (you have one, right?). Don't make them run a thousand commands for you. Build actual diagnostic features into the product. Some organizations (hint: they have lots of money), don't let your icky code talk to the internet. Offline activation, offline updates, and offline diagnostics are super important to counting these folks as customers. |