- Tools Used in This Book
- What Does Your Application Need?
- Data Layer
- Application Layer
- HTTP and REST
- Authorization Layer
- Client Layer
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
What Does Your Application Need?
After you have the basic requirements for your application and decide what you need to implement, you can then begin to describe what you need to implement this application. Typically this is not a question that you think about when creating smaller scale applications because you have everything you need in a single box. Instead of looking at everything together as one complete unit or "box," you need to split out what you actually need and identify what cloud services you can use to fit these requirements. Typical applications need the following:
- Compute power
- Fast temporary storage
- Large long-term storage
- Small queryable long-term storage
- Communication between components or modules
Think about this application as a typical nonstatic website that requires some sort of execution environment or web server, such as an e-commerce site or web blog. When a request comes in, you need to return an HTML page, or perhaps an XML or JSON representation of just the data, that may be either static or dynamically created. To determine this, you need to process the actual request using your compute power. This process also requires fast temporary storage to store the request and build the response. It may also require you to pull information about the users out of a queryable long-term storage location. After you look up the users' information, you may need to pull out some larger long-term storage information, such as a picture that they may have requested or a specific blog entry that is too large to store in a smaller queryable storage engine. If the users request to upload a picture, you may have to store that image in your larger long-term storage engine and then request that the image be resized to multiple sizes, so it may be used for a thumbnail image. Each of these requirements your application has on the backend may be solved by using services offered by your cloud provider.
If you expand this simple website to include any service, you can realize that all your applications need the same exact thing. If you split apart this application into multiple layers, you can begin to understand what it truly means to build SaaS, instead of just the typical desktop application. One major advantage of SaaS is that it lends itself to subscription-based software, which doesn't require complex licensing or distribution points, which not only cuts cost, but also ensures that you won't have to worry about pirating. Because you're actually providing a service, you're locking your clients into paying you every time that they want to use the service. Clients also prefer this method because, just like with a cloud-hosting provider, they don't have to pay as much upfront, and they can typically buy in a small trial account to see if it will work for them. They also don't have to invest in any local hardware and can access their information and services from any Internet access. This type of application moves away from the requirements of having big applications on your client's systems to processing everything on your servers, which means clients need less money to get into your application.
Taking a look back at your website, you can see that there are three main layers of this application. This is commonly referred to as a three-tier application pattern and has been used for years to develop SaaS. The three layers include the data layer to store all your long-term needs, the application layer to process your data, and the client or presentation layer to present the data and the processes you can perform for your client.