Drupal SaaS

Building software as a service on Drupal

Colan Schwartz

Drupal SaaS

Building software as a service on Drupal

Colan Schwartz

DrupalCamp Ottawa 2018

Who am I?

• On Drupal.org for 12 years 5 months as colan
• Maintain over 40 modules
• Worked on first release of buyandsell.gc.ca
• [GSOC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code) Mentor for data-encryption projects
• Core Maintainer of the Aegir Hosting System
• Enterprise Cloud Architect
• Drupal/Aegir/SaaS/PaaS/SaaP/IaaS Consultant
• Founding Partner of Consensus Enterprises

Consensus Enterprises

Helping you do big things in the cloud

• DevOps processes & documentation
• Self-hosted multisite solutions & audits
• Application lifecycle management
• Continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD)
• Cloud infrastructure
• Software-as-a-service engineering

Ground Rules

• Please interrupt at any time!
  • Ask questions & share knowledge
• Feel free to follow along in your own browser
  • talks.consensus.enterprises/drupal-saas
• Presentation is licensed for reuse
• Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Interested in Drupal SaaS?

How many of you are…

• considering building a SaaS product?
• currently working on a SaaS product?
• already selling a SaaS product?
• just realizing you're in the wrong room?

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Other interests?

Project vs. Product

• Different than development contracts
• Lots of unpaid work to build platform
• Have a plan for keeping the lights on
• Consulting? Investors? Rich relative?
• Now: Lots of development. No regular income.
• Later: Little development. Lots of regular income.

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…but only if you’re successful.

Hosting

Drupal Hosting Companies

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Pros

• Outsource infrastructure
• Simplify site maintenance

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Cons

• Vendor lock-in
• No control over hosting costs
• No control over data centre locations
• Non-portable configuration as code
• Don't support multisite
• Costs may not scale well for many sites

Infrastructure

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Proprietary IaaS

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Google Cloud Services (GCS)
• Microsoft Azure

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Open-source IaaS

• [OpenStack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack)

Infrastructure

OpenStack

• No vendor lock-in
• Often no data in & out charges
• Portable configuration as code: standard API
• Data centres in various countries
• Data portability (e.g. export & import VMs)
• More control over hosting costs

But you still need a hosting system!

Do you need to write one from scratch?

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No!

Why?

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Aegir!

Aegir Hosting System

• Designed for hosting Drupal sites
• Open source
• 10+ years!
• Web services API

How many of you…

• Have heard of Aegir?
• Are using Aegir?
• Were using Aegir?

So you now have a hosting system…

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How do you integrate it with:

• e-commerce
• recurring billing
• subscription services

Aegir Site Subscriptions

Adds e-commerce to the Aegir ecosystem by associating hosted sites with customer subscriptions via recurring billing. Communicates with the Aegir API over Web services.

Aegir Site Subscriptions

Process

1. Customer selects a plan
2. Subscription service takes payment info
3. Customer's site gets provisioned
4. Site gets deleted on payment failures

Aegir Site Subscriptions

Subscription Providers

Plug-ins

1. [Recurly](https://www.drupal.org/project/recurly) (done)
2. [Commerce Recurring Framework](https://www.drupal.org/project/commerce_recurring) (ideal, needs funding)
3. Others (need funding)

Customer site issues

• [Installation profiles](https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/creating-distributions/how-to-write-a-drupal-8-installation-profile) (distros) vs. [Features](https://www.drupal.org/project/features)
• Resource quotas
  • [Site Quota Enforcer](https://www.drupal.org/project/quenforcer)
• Site admin access
  • User 1 vs. Owner role
  • [Permissions Subset](https://www.drupal.org/project/subpermissions) (needs D8 port)

Customer Service

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Public-facing issue tracker

• [GitLab](https://about.gitlab.com/)'s [Service Desk](https://about.gitlab.com/features/service-desk/)
• Associates customer tickets with project issues
• Good option if already using GitLab
  • And who isn't?
• Other good options?

Thank you!

Feedback

• Questions?
• Comments?
• Thoughts?