The actual infrastructure costs of running SaaS at scale (billions of requests/month)

Flagsmith's journey to optimize its SaaS infrastructure over time reveals a series of strategic decisions aimed at balancing cost, scalability, and reliability. Initially launched as a side project, the platform utilized cost-effective solutions like Hetzner and dokku, with minimal redundancy and scalability, primarily because it had zero customers. As usage grew, notably due to a large UK lottery operator, Flagsmith transitioned to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which provided necessary features such as auto-scaling and managed databases, despite some deployment challenges. This setup allowed the company to handle a significantly increased load, though database connections eventually became a bottleneck. The next evolution involved moving to AWS ECS and Fargate, leveraging Docker and containerization to align more closely with enterprise standards, resulting in improved performance and reduced anxiety during deployments. With costs stabilizing and infrastructure solidified, Flagsmith plans to further enhance its system by migrating SDK traffic to a globally distributed Edge API, promising to maintain its commitment to efficient and scalable infrastructure.

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