Key Takeaways

Promise of SAS

• Maintaining agility and flexibility for teams
• Continuing to focus on delivering innovation for customers
• Maintaining operational efficiency
• Achieving sustainable growth and profitability

Pitfalls and Learnings

1. Out of Control

• Importance of having a control plane to manage SAS at scale
• SAS Builder Toolkit (SBT) as an open-source solution to build the control plane
• Standardization and pluggability of SBT for different components

2. Identity Crisis

• Differentiating identity management for the control plane and application plane
• Avoiding tenant mapping by using Cognito user pools and JWT tokens
• Implementing row-level security using AWS IAM and ABAC
• Considering federated identity and frictionless onboarding

3. Leaving Out the Microscope

• Importance of observability for different roles (cost management, troubleshooting, product development, security, and compliance)
• Using OpenTelemetry for flexibility and integrating with third-party observability tools
• Ensuring tenant context in all observability data

4. Revenue Leakage

• Implementing resilient and flexible billing with event-driven architecture
• Tracking and avoiding revenue leakage through usage monitoring and entitlement management
• Considering free trial experiences and the "last mile of pricing"

5. Failing to Fail

• Importance of comprehensive testing, including policies, artificial tenants, and load testing
• Using chaos engineering tools like Gremlin to introduce failures and test resilience

6. Not Anticipating More Complex Deployments

• Addressing customer demands for deploying infrastructure in their own accounts
• Exploring solutions like customer-managed keys, Nitro Enclaves, data privacy vaults, and remote agents
• Ensuring observability and control across these complex deployment models

Upcoming Sessions

• SAS 406: SAS Builder Toolkit (Todd Golding) - Tomorrow, 12:30 PM
• SAS 304: SAS Builder Toolkit Workshop - Tomorrow