Remaining Aligned on Full Stack Silo Mindset
Before I move on to any new deployment models, it’s essential that we align on some key principles in the full stack silo. For some, the allure of the full stack silo model can be appealing because it can feel like it opens (or re-opens) the door for SaaS providers to offer one-off customization to their tenants. While it’s true that the full stack silo model offers dedicated resources, this should never be viewed as an opportunity to fall back to the world of per-tenant customization. The full stack silo only exists to accommodate domain, compliance, tiering, and any other business realities that might warrant the use of a full stack silo model.
In all respects, a full stack silo environment is treated the same as a pooled environment. Whenever new features are released, they are deployed to all customers. If your infrastructure configuration needs to be changed, that change should be applied to all of your siloed environments. If you have policies for scaling or other run-time behaviors, they are applied based on tenant tiers. You should never have a policy which is applied to an individual tenant. The whole point of SaaS is that we are trying to achieve agility, innovation, scale, and efficiency through our ability to manage and operate our tenants collectively. Any drift toward a one-off model will slowly take you away from those SaaS goals. In some cases, organizations that moved to SaaS to maximize efficiency will end up regressing through one-off customizations that undermine much of the value they hoped to get out of a true SaaS model.
The guidance I always offer to drive this point home centers around how you arrive at a full stack silo model. I tell teams that–even if you’re targeting a full stack silo as your starting point–you should build your solution as if it were going to be a full stack pooled model. Then, treat each full stack silo as an instance of your pooled environment that happens to have a single tenant. This serves as a forcing function that allows the full stack siloed environments to inherit the same values that are applied to a full stack pool (which we’re covering next).
