DevOps for SaaS Projects: Why It Matters and How to Get It Right in 2024
Running a SaaS product is the definition of walking a tightrope between high-pressure expectations. Since you’re reading an article about DevOps for SaaS, we’ll take a guess and say that you might be dealing with the challenge of balancing delivery speed, stability, and scalability. On top of handling all that, you’re probably also concerned about security demands and the risk of infrastructure costs growing. If these worries are constantly on your mind, it makes sense to consider bringing development and operations expertise into your project.
“By leveraging DevOps for the SaaS project, you can scale while maintaining control over your product’s stability, infrastructure costs, and security. Ultimately, it’s about making life easier for you by delivering better products faster and without constant anxiety about technical issues.”
— Andrii B., DevOps engineer at Brights
Despite the obvious benefits, many companies struggle to introduce DevOps into their projects. According to a 2024 report by Redgate, the top obstacle to implementing a DevOps approach is lack of appropriate skills in the team (cited by 42% of respondents).
As an agency with a skilled DevOps team, we are here on a mission to help SaaS companies leverage the power of this approach and tackle SaaS challenges together. Let’s dive into the insights on working with the DevOps approach shared by Brights’ specialists based on their real-life experience.
All-in-one banking and payment platform developed by Brights
Key takeaways
The DevOps approach bridges the gap between development and operations by integrating development, quality control, and deployment into a continuous, collaborative process.
The key roles of DevOps specialists working on SaaS projects include process automation, infrastructure management, monitoring and logging, and ensuring security.
Depending on the development stage, DevOps tasks and priorities may differ. For instance, in early-stage SaaS projects, DevOps engineers focus on automating the deployment of minimal functionality. In large-scale, established SaaS projects, the DevOps team mainly works on automating CI/CD pipelines, configuring complex orchestration systems, and managing large-scale workloads.
There are six DevOps roles that fill different project needs: DevOps evangelist, code release manager, automation architect, experience assurance (XA) professional, test engineer, and security compliance engineer (SCE).
Depending on the SaaS app’s complexity, DevOps services will add $1,000 ‒ $2,000 to the overall cost of the development project.
When does your SaaS project need DevOps services?
To understand DevOps better, think of it as a tech philosophy that has bridged development and operations, two processes that were parallel once, with two teams working in isolation and workflows being siloed. By bringing development, quality control, and deployment together into a continuous process, the DevOps approach has helped teams improve collaboration and deliver better products faster.
At the same time, DevOps is quite a broad term that encompasses a number of practices, and depending on your project’s stage and scale, the DevOps team’s tasks and approaches may differ. We’ve asked our specialist in the field to walk us through the specifics of DevOps for SaaS projects of different scales.
The priorities of a DevOps team depending on the project’s scale
Early-stage SaaS projects
Implementing DevOps early in a SaaS product may seem redundant, but in our experience, it actually can set you up for easier scaling and quicker market delivery. By automating tasks like testing and deployment, the team can focus on building features instead of managing infrastructure. Besides, it will get you prepared for the future challenges startups experience when their products gain traction. So, what is the role of the DevOps team in early-stage SaaS projects?
“With minimal viable products and early-stage SaaS products, our key task is automated deployment of minimal functionality. At this point, I can single out three priorities: speed, cost minimization, and flexible architecture.
Early-stage SaaS projects prioritize speed. When working on such cases, our DevOps team focuses on quickly setting up the basic infrastructure, which allows swift application deployment and update implementation. Here, the key is to minimize setup time and ensure simplicity of the processes.
Also, at the MVP stage, companies often work with limited resources, so the DevOps team tends to use cloud-based solutions that are easily scalable and do not require large infrastructure investments. Using platforms like PaaS allows you to reduce the costs of configuring servers.
Last but not least, with early-stage SaaS products, we go for flexible architecture so that it allows for rapid code changes, testing of new features, but without the complex processes required for large products.”
— Andrii B, DevOps engineer at Brights
As for the tools, at this stage, our DevOps engineer recommends utilizing a simple CI/CD pipeline and a basic infrastructure.
Growing SaaS products
The more your SaaS product grows, the higher get the stakes. So, for SaaS apps that are scaling rapidly, you need to focus on supporting scalability and ensuring smooth performance.
As you grow out of early adopters stage and attract more customers, your audience will be less likely to “forgive” downtime and slow deployment cycles. Instead, they will get frustrated, and you will lose revenue. This is where DevOps engineers come in to save the day. Their job at this point is to help you build a stronger, more reliable infrastructure that can handle increased traffic without sacrificing performance.
Another major issue for growing SaaS products are security concerns. With more users, more data, and often more regulations to comply with, you should make sure that security checks are part of your deployment pipelines on every level. DevSecOps, which means inclusion of security into DevOps workflows, will help you catch vulnerabilities early without slowing down the development process. This will, obviously, reflect positively on customers' trust in your product and enhance your brand's reputation.
On top of that, at this stage, the speed of deployments becomes a major differentiator. By this point, your customers expect a lot from your product: constant improvements, new features, quick fixes. All of this requires faster release cycles, and the DevOps team make those possible through continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
SaaS projects of established enterprises
DevOps for a SaaS company of large scale isn’t simply helpful, it’s imperative. We bet that at this stage, your workflows are extremely complex, your infrastructure requirements are massive, and your organization has multiple teams working on different product components. So, without proper DevOps expertise, minimizing the friction between development, operations, and other departments would be a challenge to say the least.
“For large-scale, enterprise-level SaaS projects, our primary tasks include reliable automation of CI/CD pipelines, configuration of complex orchestration systems, and management of large-scale workloads. During such projects, we have to prioritize stability, scalability, and strict security measures.”
— Andrii B, DevOps engineer at Brights
For large, well-established products, DevOps priorities shift to ensuring high reliability, scalability, and security of the infrastructure. Automating deployment processes and monitoring becomes more complex as the product serves a large number of users.
Such projects also have very high security requirements, so data security and compliance with standards are especially important here. The DevOps team’s role is to implement complex solutions for managing security at the infrastructure level: access control, encryption, auditing, etc.
“Another major issue with large-scale SaaS products is the increase in the number of users and system load, which requires complex performance monitoring, load forecasting, and disaster recovery planning. To deal with this, the DevOps team configures tools to continuously monitor system performance to respond to problems in real time.
Also, for enterprise-level SaaS projects, it’s essential to minimize downtime during updates or patches. This is achieved through sophisticated CI/CD pipelines with non-disruptive continuous deployment features.”
— Andrii B, DevOps engineer at Brights
For large-scale SaaS products, our DevOps team recommends using technologies like Kubernetes, AWS ECS, AWS EKS, Terraform, Ansible, Graffana, and Sentry for monitoring.
DevOps roles in different SaaS project stages
DevOps can benefit SaaS projects by reducing backlogs, improving communication, and ensuring quicker time to market. To make all this happen, there are six essential DevOps roles to fill different needs at difference development stages.
| Role | Responsibility | SaaS development stage |
|---|---|---|
| DevOps evangelist | A champion of DevOps culture within the organization, responsible for promoting and implementing DevOps practices. Key tasks include: - Advocating for DevOps practices; - Driving cultural change; - Promoting continuous improvement. | All stages, particularly during early adoption and organizational change. |
| Code release manager | A project manager of the DevOps approach who oversees the release of new software, ensuring that code is deployed consistently and without errors. Key tasks include: -Managing code repositories; -Overseeing build and release pipelines; -Coordinating release schedules. | Development and release stages, essential for deployment and post-launch updates. |
| Automation architect | Designs and implements automation in development, testing, and operations, focusing on CI/CD pipelines. Key tasks include: -Implementing automation tools; -Creating CI/CD pipelines; -Reducing manual interventions in deployments. | Development and testing stages, critical for streamlining deployment. |
| Experience assurance (XA) professional | Ensures the quality of the user experience throughout development, from early stages to post-launch. Key tasks include: -Monitoring user experience; -Ensuring usability standards; -Collaborating with developers to improve UX. | Testing, pre-launch, and post-launch stages, ensuring a smooth user experience. |
| Test engineer | Focuses on testing the software to ensure quality and functionality before reaching production. Key tasks include: -Writing and running automated tests; -Performing manual testing; -Ensuring bug tracking and resolution. | Development and testing stages, important for bug fixing and quality assurance. |
| Security compliance engineer (SCE) | Ensures that DevOps processes meet security and compliance standards, safeguarding data and infrastructure. Key tasks include: -Monitoring for security vulnerabilities; -Ensuring compliance with regulations; -Implementing security protocols in CI/CD. | All stages, especially during development, testing, and deployment. |
In a DevOps setup, these roles join forces to ensure a product that runs like clockwork through the development, deployment, and monitoring processes. With the DevOps team’s help, you can count on faster product launches, better quality, and a far more harmonious process that keeps both teams and customers happy.
Guideline on introducing DevOps in SaaS projects
Now that we’ve got the role of DevOps for SaaS projects covered, it’s time to get down to implementation. Below, we go through five essential steps to help your SaaS product scale smoothly while keeping performance high.
5 steps to introducing DevOps into SaaS projects
Step 1. Planning the DevOps integration
Before introducing DevOps into your project, you have to understand what you want to achieve by defining business objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs). DevOps is not a tool set but rather a cultural shift, meaning it will impact the whole development process and change how your technical team collaborates to deliver value. Whether it’s faster feature releases, less downtime, or more system reliability, the project's goals will be the driving force behind your SaaS DevOps strategy.
Step 2. Building the team
The foundation of a proper DevOps SaaS implementation is close collaboration between development, operations, and sometimes security teams. The traditional approach of isolated teams handling specific tasks won’t cut it in a DevOps-driven SaaS project.
We always recommend aiming for cross-functional teams where developers, QA engineers, and operations staff work together, sharing the responsibility for the code and the infrastructure it runs on. Another tip here is to ensure that the roles within your team are flexible and encourage end-to-end product ownership.
Step 3. Selecting the right DevOps tools and technologies
The basis of any DevOps process is automation, and this is where tools come into play. Automation instruments help streamline repetitive tasks like building, testing, and deploying code so that the tech team can focus on more complex challenges. In addition to speeding up development, these tools also minimize the risk of human error.
Here is a cheat sheet with the essential tools we typically use:
| DevOps task | Tools we use |
|---|---|
| Continuous integration (CI) and Continuous delivery (CD) tools to automate the build, test, and deployment pipelines | Bitbucket, GitHub |
| Cloud platforms and infrastructure tools that provide scalable infrastructure to host, manage, and deploy your SaaS application | AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure |
| Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which allows you to manage your infrastructure in a version-controlled, repeatable manner for seamless automated scaling | Terraform, AWS CloudFormation |
| Monitoring and logging for real-time insights into your SaaS application’s performance and system health | Grafana, Sentry |
| Containerization and orchestration to package SaaS applications into isolated containers and manage them across distributed environments | Kubernets |
You can find out more about essential tools for SaaS development in our article about the SaaS technology stack.
Step 4. Establishing DevOps best practices
In addition to tools, there are DevOps SaaS best practices that experienced teams follow to ensure continuous improvement and high availability in SaaS environments. Here are the most essential and universal ones:
Automate what can be automated. Testing, deployment, infrastructure provisioning, monitoring — all this can be automated. As a result, your team will have more time for strategic initiatives like feature development.
Emphasize continuous improvement. The deployment frequency, failure rate, and recovery time are the key metrics that can help you assess the system’s health and drive processes to enable faster and more reliable releases.
Version control for everything. Version both code and infrastructure using tools like Git and Terraform. This allows for easy rollbacks and faster disaster recovery.
Ensure security early on. Integrate security checks into your CI/CD pipeline from the start. This keeps your SaaS secure and compliant without slowing down development.
Step 5: Adopting a continuous improvement mindset
DevOps is never a “set it and forget it” approach. After setting up your initial DevOps pipeline, you need to iterate on it constantly based on real feedback. This could involve refining automated tests, optimizing your monitoring systems, adjusting your team structure based on bottlenecks, etc.
We also recommend regularly reviewing KPIs like deployment time, recovery time after incidents, and system uptime. To identify areas of improvement and maintain agile DevOps processes, use post-mortem reviews after incidents or outages.
Additional tip
Last but not least, when working with SaaS projects, you need to be aware of the common mistakes so that you can avoid them. Here is what our DevOps engineer has to say on the matter:
“One of the biggest mistakes I often see in SaaS projects is the absence of containerization, which makes environments harder to manage and replicate. Lack of process automation is another issue that slows down deployments and increases errors. Insufficient monitoring and logging leave teams unaware of potential issues until they escalate. Incorrect scaling is common too, where resources either get over-provisioned or under-provisioned. Security being treated as an afterthought rather than a priority is also a significant concern.”
— Andrii B, DevOps engineer at Brights
How SaaS development costs change with DevOps
If you’re convinced that your SaaS project needs DevOps expertise, the last thing to consider is the cost of these services. Here is a rough estimate of every SaaS development phase, including the DevOps component, if you decide to work with Brights.
| SaaS development phase | Cost range |
|---|---|
| Discovery phase | $2,000 ‒ $5,000 |
| UI/UX design | $3,000 ‒ $6,000 |
| Front-end and back-end development | $28,000 ‒ $100,000 |
| DevOps services | $1,000 ‒ $2,000 |
| QA Services | $5,000 ‒ $10,000 |
| Post-release maintenance | $10,000 ‒ $30,000 per year |
“Depending on the SaaS app’s complexity, DevOps services will add only $1,000 ‒ $2,000 to the overall cost of the development project. However, in the long run, it will help you save costs since DevOps significantly simplifies the process of adding new components to the code base for developers.”
— Bohdan K., business analyst at Brights
It’s important to note that SaaS DevOps automation requires a lot of tools, which will also contribute to your expenses. For instance, hosting, server maintenance, and cloud service subscriptions typically range from $1,000 to $5,000 monthly, depending on the scale and complexity. For a more detailed breakdown, check our article on SaaS development costs.
Why Brights is a reliable DevOps partner for your SaaS
All the insights, tips, and SaaS DevOps practices we share in this article are based on our experience as an outsourcingcompany with a focus on SaaS that offers DevOps services. But what makes Brights a trustworthy SaaS-focused managed DevOps team? And why should you trust our expertise? Our DevOps specialist singled out six reasons why SaaS businesses of different scales turn to us.
6 reasons why you should trust your SaaS to Brights’ DevOps engineers
Tailored infrastructure planning. At Brights, we don’t believe in guesswork. Instead, before a single line of code hits the server, we dive into the project's requirements, client needs, and expected workload. This way, we know exactly what kind of infrastructure will handle the load, ensuring everything runs like clockwork right away.
Focus on security. We treat security as a core part of each project to ensure your application and your clients are fortified against potential threats at every step. It’s better (and more cost-efficient) to build an impenetrable security wall now than try to patch holes later.
Proactive monitoring and escalation. If something goes wrong, we’ll know about it fast. We implement comprehensive monitoring systems for both application and resource statuses, paired with a logging system. We also have an escalation system: if something happens to the app and the main DevOps expert does not respond to the alert, the system will automatically notify the next available DevOps engineer within 15 minutes. This way, there is always a specialist who can fix the issue.
Comprehensive knowledge base. With SaaS projects, it’s particularly important to be prepared to handle issues at any times, since even minimal disruptions can lose your customers. We always create a detailed knowledge base and project documentation. This way, our DevOps engineers are interchangeable, and the absence of the specialist on the project doesn’t cause any bottlenecks.
Detailed architecture and documentation. Before deploying the project, we make an architectural diagram and, throughout the deployment process, document every aspect of the project. This makes future updates and support much easier and faster.
Automation at every opportunity. CI/CD pipelines, backups, notifications, code vulnerability scans — if it can be automated, we’ll make it happen. This frees up time for the more complex stuff and allows us to improve overall efficiency.
We don’t expect you to just take our word for it — choosing an outsourcing team for any kind of development aspect should always be based on their proven track-record in the field. So, that’s what we are going to do — share the story of one of our most complex cases in terms of DevOps.
Banking and payment SaaS platform developed by Brights
While this particular project is under NDA, and we can’t name it, we still can share certain details of our work on this banking and payment SaaS platform for efficient financial management.
The Brights’ task here was to build an intuitive, transparent, free banking and payment platform that would streamline financial management and accounting for small and medium-sized businesses in one system.
Our main development challenge lied in setting up a stable and scalable architecture, ready to handle tens of thousands of transactions monthly without any delays. And since it’s for budget management, payment processing, and accounting, it goes without saying that the platform had to be bulletproof in terms of security.
Source: Brights’ case study
We used AWS services like ECS, S3, RDS, ElastiCache, API Gateway, and Lambda to create a scalable infrastructure. Yet, since it is extremely complex, we had to battle quite a few issues throughout development:
Service configuration and interaction: We put extra effort into managing IAM policies and securing communication between private and public networks, along with configuring secure routing between private subnets and public services through precise setup of NAT gateways and VPC Endpoints.
Monitoring and logging: Brights ensured full system visibility with CloudWatch and EventBridge, avoiding misconfiguration risks.
Scalability and performance: Our team properly tuned Auto Scaling to balance load, maintain performance, and control costs. We also connected ECS API, RDS, and Redis while maintaining load balance and fault tolerance.
Configuration management: We handled access to secrets using AWS Secret Manager to prevent data leaks.
Deployment: While we initially relied on AWS Lambda, we later shifted to Amazon ECS as the project grew to address increased complexity and resource demands.
With meticulous planning and an experienced DevOps team that cares, all the challenges connected to the SaaS app’s architecture can be tackled, be it security, performance, or any other issue. We are immensely proud of this particular case, and would happily apply our DevOps expertise to your project as well, no matter how complex it is.
Conclusion
Depending on whether you’re just entering the SaaS market or already managing a fast-growing, successful product, your challenges will differ. Early on, you might struggle with rising infrastructure expenses, and later, you might fail to ensure continuous integration or respond to incidents fast enough. One thing we know for sure is that in all these cases, solid DevOps expertise can save you time and money, while also granting you peace of mind.
We know finding the right fit when looking for DevOps engineers can feel overwhelming. But whether you’re ready to jump right into dealing with the current challenges or are still unsure if you need DevOps support at all, Brights is here to help. Our team would happily consult you, dive deep into your needs, and provide a straightforward DevOps strategy for SaaS you can follow up on.
FAQ
There are a few signs that your SaaS project is in desperate need of DevOps specialists. If your deployments are slow, unpredictable, or prone to errors — that’s a major red flag. Frequent SaaS downtime, difficulty scaling as user demand grows, or manual, repetitive processes that eat up your developers’ time are also concerning signs. Last but not least, having little control over infrastructure costs and security incidents also indicates that it’s time to bring DevOps engineers in to sort things out.
