Azure DevOps Series - Overview

Azure DevOps is a SaaS platform that provides tools for deploying software using DevOps techniques generally within Agile software delivery projects.  DevOps is useful for gathering requirements, building the solution, performing daily “integration builds”, and having deliverable end-of-sprint demos.  The key to building software today versus several years ago is that we should automate as much as possible.  Azure DevOps provides excellent tooling to automate and implement automation results in better quality, reduced timelines.  Building software is easy as long as you have great people and precise requirements.  Agile practices and DevOps processes and tooling can help get you to the desired state.

1. Azure Boards are great for planning and getting the requirements cleanly broken down.
2. Visual Studio coupled with Azure boards items with Azure Repos (source control options are GitHub & TFVS) is ideal for the development using most languages such as C#, NodesJS, Angular, React, TypeScript.
3. Azure Pipelines are good at deploying solutions by setting up the infrastructure (I prefer to use PaaS and get out of the Infrastructure world, using ARM templates) and deploying code with the appropriate DTAP environment configuration.  Azure Test Plans are used to verify builds. 
4. Monitor and Alert – Azure Monitor/App Insights is ideal for monitoring the infrastructure and operating code to detect issues early.
5. Azure Artifacts help create and share Nuget code packages.

More Info:

https://www.pbeck.co.uk/2021/07/azure-devops-user-storing-tips.html

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-scenario/apps/devops-dotnet-webapp

Azure DevOps Series Posts:

1. Azure DevOps Series - Overview (This Post)
2. Azure DevOps Series - Azure Boards 
3. Missing
4. Azure DevOps Series - Azure Pipelines
5. Azure DevOps Series - DevSecOps

Figuring out SaaS licencing and SLA's

Overview: Buyers be they B2B or B2C will want to understand you licensing, probably cost, and level of service.  Keep it simple, keep it understandable, make sure you cover what availability, performance, actions users can use you service for are all clearly outlined in you Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Licensing pricing options:  Pay per use one-off, yearly, pay per user monthly or annual, pay per consumption e.g. stripe.  

SLA:

• Availability 99.9 or better is good, it really depends on what you are offering but there are often penalties for missing availability SLA.  If I build a pretty standard SaaS application that utilises App Services, APIM (standard, premium geo loaded has a higher SLA) and Azure SQL, I can't make a 99.9% SLA excluding AAD and any patching, or application caused downtime.  At a SaaS product level providing an actual 99.999% (5 nines) SLA is not as easy as the marketing and legal stakeholders might assume.

It becomes easier to offer 99.9+% SLA's if you as a company assume the risk.  i.e it's unlikely all the downtime will occur and affect you sequentially so offering money back is absolutely possible.  Also most SaaS companies require clients to claim, it is not monitored and automatically applied to your bill.

• Support - phone, bot, email and max time to respond and time to resolve.  
• B2B Monitoring - Good idea to monitor you SaaS provider and not just take their word for it.  Technically, monitor availability of individual services (web sites or API's), it also good to know when items outside of your control (with the SaaS vendor) are unavailable in internal support.  Examples: page load times, login times, you are looking for availability and speed.   How much of the service is down, how much does this affect end customers.   You may want to use a 3rd party tool or write your own as a last resort to monitoring.  When relying on 3rd parties to provide services ensure you do a hazard risk assessment.  Plan for when things happen, how will you respond, adjust.

SaaS Onboarding & Payment collections

SaaS Customer Experience

SLA vs SLO vs SLI:

• SLA (Servcie Level Agreement - contractual agreement SaaS company makes with the customer.
• SLO  (Service Level Objective) - Goal availability (and acceptable performance) of the microservice or application.  Measurement goal.
• SLI (Service Level Indicator) - checks if SLO is achieved.  Actual Measurement.

As part of High Availability and scalability, it is a good idea to know how many instances and how autogrowth is setup, here is an example for Azure App Services.

Scale Out (CPU or Memory) - Matrix Threshold (Avg): 70, Duration:  5 Min, Cool down Time:  5 Min, Increase Count: 1

Scale In   (CPU or Memory) - Matrix Threshold (Avg): 40, Duration: 30 Min, Cool down Time: 10 Min, Decrease Count: 1

Power Apps - MicrosoftTeams.CreateATeam() connector method not working

Problem:  I am provisioning a new team inside my tenant using Power Apps.  The code throws an error and I can't get the TeamId, however, the Team is being created.

Hypothesis:  The call creates the team and using the Monitoring Tool inside Power Apps I can see the call is working.  The issue appears to be when Power Apps reads the response.

Possible Resolutions:  

1. Use Power Automate and fire from the Power App
2. Create a custom Postman Collection using the Teams Graph API

Asking for Gender Pronouns and Title in forms

 Here are a few pointers when asking for Gender, Sex, Pronouns and Users Title

SaaS Onboarding & Payment Collection

Overview:  Selling a SaaS generally can be split into B2C and B2B.  Both SaaS models require the ability to onboard a customer and collect the payments for the service.  And to do this a website /Content Management System is need to allow the customer to trial, buy, purchase add-on and collect recurring revenue.

B2C SaaS (small to large):  You need "brochureware", web pages that show the service and allow the user to purchase.   As I generally sell SaaS software, and B2C is often 1 off or pay as you need, I'd recommend Shopify, there are add-ons for selling digital goods.  You can always use marketplaces like amazon or eBay also.  WooCommerce (integrates with WordPress), BigCommenrce, Magento, Wix, SquareSpace can be used for selling physical goods but need some thought and add-ons for digital goods.  All the options are not great at Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) e.g. Netflix, or ARR (annual, e.g. Grammarly, Blinkist) billing, or "pay as you consume" also referred to as "metered billing" or "pay-as-you-go pricing" (Uber, AWS, Twilio, Stripe, Azure, GCP) revenue models.  Pay-as-you-go pricing has variable costs but allows your to reduce the cost to your customer by only charging them for what they use.

Update 2022/06/24: Webflow is a great tool for semi web literate developers to build websites.  UI drag and drop experience.  In the Wix space but you drag vs choosing a template.  I've used it to generate clean semantically correct HTML/CSS to implement in a custom developed SPA solution.  Always consider Webflow, it has checkout and can easily integrate with Shopify and Zapier for simple workflows.  Has free SSL and you can host on their platform.  Priced per website but reasonable with various options.

There are plenty of add-ons but in the Shopify world it's bring in an add-on and a few moving pieces.  For a medium sized SaaS selling MMR solutions, the overhead of setting up and managing the processes is fairly steep.  As the business gets bigger, it's worth the integration or using a dedicated solution like ChargeBee.

B2B SaaS: Could use any revenue model but it is best if your product lends itself to subscription-based selling.  e.g. Office 365, Workday, Legal practice management software to manage clients and work for law firm.  For small SaaS startups selling digital services use a solution like ChargeBee (low end) or Paddle (top end).  You can use anything in-between and addons to get a solution but for the price, setup, expansion as a general rule ChargeBee is good:

1. Recurly
2. Chargify
3. Zuora
4. Chargify
5. Stripe
6. Billby (Good for startups)
7. ChargeBee (Good for startups)
8. Bill.com for Accounts payable and receivable.

In the UK, we need direct debits often setup, you can look at something like Bottomline PTX.  I also like recharge.

Privacy Management: OneTrust provides a good configurable SaaS service for cookies and privacy.  If not built into your CMS/platform, then OneTrust is an option.

Pay-as-you-go/metered billing:  You pay based on consumption of services you owed x for the last 30 days e.g. AWS, Azure.  I try to stay away from this model as it's normally difficult to understand and customers in SaaS as a general rule don't like complex unknown pricing models.

Traditional:  Basically, pay as you buy a license.  So you get a perpetual license.  Akin to physical shopping but for digital goods.  Shopify is perfect for this model with a digital download add-on.  E.g. bjjfanatics.com

SME SaaS Business Checklist:

1. Where you you selling, physical vs virtual
2. Subscription or 1 off payments (account maintenance), trials, upgrade, upsell and cross selling.  Autorenewals.
3. Jurisdictions (Tax, VAT, shipping, currency)
4. Cost (fees, what's included, percentage of sales, growth)
5. Support (Tech touch, Low touch e.g. email vs 24 hrs phone support, is this subscription based)
6. Retention (Churn, New, Length of time for customers, support churn warnings, unsubscribing).
7. Does my billing/subscription allow me to sell on web, native mobile, marketplaces.

Methods to set the SaaS price:

1. Value based pricing - set the price based on the value the customer saves/gets
2. Cost plus pricing - your cost plus markup
3. Competitor pricing - what our our competitors charging
4. Art of adjustment pricing - set a price see how much demand, change price how does it affect demand, MRR and total expected revenue.

Metrics to capture in SaaS Sales:

1. MRR
2. ARR
3. CLV (Customer lifetime value)
4. Churn rate
5. Cost of Customer Acquisition

Marketing: https://sproutsocial.com/

Support:  It's important to minimize human support effort, automating as much as possible is key.  Bots, knowledge articles that are easy to find are awesome.  Coveo does a nice job of setup for community channels.

User tracking:  Google analytics is pretty good for getting stats.  I do like a new tool to me Pendo which is expensive but extremely powerful.  Pendo's main 2 features for me are user interaction/how they use the site, and providing help tips/Guides are html injected into applications.

Azure Synapse Intro

I have not done any serious big data work in many years and I'm using this post to understand the Azure options and update my skills.   

Azure Synapse Analytics - built for limitless scale for unstructured and structure data for big data  - supports petabyte analytics.  Ingest and prepare data for BI.  Instance can be a dedicated or serverless PaaS service.  Data lake Gen 2 assigned to each synapse instance.  GA Dec 2020.

Use to be Data Lake (massive, semi structured data) and Data warehouse, Azure Synapse Analytics can be referred to as Data Lakehouse.  Basically all the sperate pieces are under 1 umbrella i.e. ADF, SSIS, Dataware house,..

• SQL Serverless Pools is pay be use/pay per query.  Can use SSMS to manage data.  Good for small or new data ware housing.  T-SQL works perfectly so simple for smaller projects or PoCs. 
• Go from 3NF in relational data to using Fact and dimension tables to put data into a star model for MPP.
• Data Warehouse Units (DW) - Same as DTU, made up of CPU, Mem, IO.  Simple to upgrade.  Lowest is DW100 can be huge, and simple to scale up and down.  More DW's means more VM's/work process work on the data.

Azure Synapse Studio  - SaaS development experience provide code free and code first (C#, Scala, Python, SQL, Java), notebooks are used for working with data.

Observability in Azure SaaS Solutions

Problem:  Software has many places where errors and tracing is logged to.   Support get an incident, they need to investigate figure out how widespread the issue is and then try patch together various logs to figure out the problem.

Thoughts:

Observability is not a new concept, we need to be able to: 1) view and connect logs & 2) tracing and view metrics & notifications.

Implementing Observability must cover:

CI/CD allows devOps teams to find issues early using Unit testing.   Automated testing on UI.  API automation testing is also great.

Azure offers continious monitoring by performing various API calls to ensure your servie is running and any failures are picked up hopefully before any customers are aware.  You can also be notified of performance slow down, check performance speed between releases.  Which is great for identifying bottlenecks and with the Azure PaaS world, it is easy to increase the processing causing the bottleneck.  

Performance metrics built into the CI/CD and developers work allows us to identify issues early and costs miles less to correct early. 

Security and LINTing in CI/CD also allows us to pickup issues early and correct at a way lower cost.

Instrument you hardware and software, well on Azure you can use App Insights and you have a fantastic instrumenting platform that captures events.  A big reason to use Azure Services for as many of the function pieces in your solution.

Work In Progress ...

TBC Azure App Insights detail, ParentOperationId, Linking operations with a ServiceBus or work process call.