Hacker News Reader

Comment by randlet | Hacker News Reader

I run a very small SaaS and do this. Each customer gets its own isolated AWS account all organized under a root account for consolidated billing. It works great and has allowed me to develop client specific features where required (using git branches). Customers like the fact that their data is completely isolated from everyone else.

Rolling out updates is simple, I just run the same deploy script for each client (after scheduling with the client if need be) and if a deploy goes wrong, you'll usually notice it after it affects one customer rather than all of them.

The main downside for me is cost. The cost per customer scales linearly which hurts as you don't get the same economies of scale like you would in single tenant solutions.

View on HN

I don't know your application enough to comment, but that seems like an extreme version of what I'm proposing, which would be to share application and DB servers between customers, but not application code and databases (i.e. you can still run 3 customers on the same EC2 and RDS instances, they just have separate application code and separate database schemas).

One of the main benefits, like you describe, is lowered costs. Running an AWS account for each customer is pretty significant overhead and would only be worth it to me if each customer was quite substantial (50K/yr or above?).

The way you are thinking would be much cheaper than what I'm doing with the downside that clients data exists on the same server (but maybe they won't care) and the fact that a performance issue for one client can impact other clients.

I haven't found an AWS account per customer to be to bad to manage yet and makes keeping track of your AWS spend per client simple. It's also trivial to run your resources in say Sydney for your Australian clients and London for your European clients.

If it works, then it works :)

Company B I mentioned above still runs location specific infrastructure, but each one of these clusters can host several customers. Of course there is some overhead (i.e. very new regions sometimes operate at a loss if there is not a critical mass of customer in that cluster, but they are subsidized by more profitable regions until they reach a critical mass of customers to pay for the whole cluster costs).

I love that you went up an encapsulation level compared to what even the OP was asking. The ability to scale and customize on a single customer level is amazing. Do you find yourself capitalizing on this capability fairly often?

80% of my clients run the same "master" version while 20% have minor customization's specific to their organization.

I don't want to end up maintaining 20 different applications, but being able to do minor modifications to the UI or data model on a per customer basis has been a nice selling point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com