How Can SaaS Adoption Promote Economy in the Age of Containers?
The role of SaaS in IT
The USP of SaaS business is the huge reduction of operational costs and complexity in setting up the model without the hassles in configuration, maintenance and upgrades. Compared to traditional legacy software, SaaS has been a perfect financial solution for business models in the last few decades. CoreIT therefore finds, with all the benefits of an OpEx vs. CapEx financial model, easy setup and installation and the option of pay-as-you-grow, SaaS to be the most efficient delivery model for generic software.
In comparison, legacy models were economic at the R&D level but failed to maintain the same cost-spreading principle at the delivery level. SaaS on the other hand is used to develop and deliver robust and secure infrastructure needed to host a service which is comparatively cost effective.
Containers and its versatility
Containers are hyper-scale infrastructure that is generic, self-healing, highly available, redundant and secure and can be built for any running application. This can be done without a high SLA and also without spending time on each service taking away the biggest advantage of SaaS delivery model i.e. infrastructure arbitrage. Thus containers prove to be much more economical and versatile option than SaaS. However, investing on containers will incur additional cost and may be a financial burden in the beginning.
The shift in approach
CoreIT today finds enterprise making an amalgamation of containers like Kubernetes into a few clusters while external vendors and in-house developers use those clusters to provide services to their clients to cut down cost. It will take a few years for such a shift to overpower the SaaS industry on a significant level but today the SaaS delivery model is a dominant model for consuming software. Though, infrastructure arbitrage is not one of its key advantages in the long run, changing the economy of SaaS might be the economical option against containerization today
