SaaS deployment in customer environments: a guide for SaaS vendors

SaaS deployment within customer environments involves running software in a client's cloud account, such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, rather than on the vendor's infrastructure. This setup is particularly favored by enterprises in regulated sectors like healthcare, financial services, and government, driven by compliance, internal security policies, and data residency requirements. The process generally involves a separation of the vendor's control plane, which oversees deployments and updates, from the application plane, which resides in the customer's cloud environment. Vendors face challenges supporting these deployments at scale, necessitating significant engineering resources or platforms like Northflank, which automate and manage multi-cloud environments. The deployment patterns vary, including distributed data stores, distributed application planes, and full remote application planes, each with distinct operational complexities. Automation using tools like Infrastructure as Code and Kubernetes is crucial for managing these deployments efficiently across different customer environments.