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How Taikun can help a software house streamline its cloud operations

SaaS companies are everywhere. Providing software services via the cloud provides incredible agility for the customers of SaaS products. This makes it an extremely attractive proposition for the customers of these software houses. From the perspective of the software houses, the main challenge is to optimize their cloud operations that serve these clients.

The more optimized the cloud operations, the better the cost management for the software house and the customers. Better cloud management is a win-win for everyone. Taikun is a Cloud Automation system that software houses can set up on their infrastructure.

The Cloud conundrum

A typical SaaS company has a common problem facing them every day. We call it the Cloud conundrum.

A large portion of the operational expense of the company is the usage of the cloud to serve its customers. The complexity increases many folds as the number of tenants increase and the cloud moves to a multi-cloud environment. This increases the need for a Cloud management software. The company also needs a software that can smoothly integrate with its CI/CD pipeline.

Taikun can play this role exceptionally well and do much more.

Taikun dashboard

Taikun can help manage customer environments very easily. You can manage customer environments as projects or as separate organisations. The robust access control in Taikun can help manage the users on the clients’ side, and provide granular access to different functionalities.

The easy management UI with Grafana in the backend helps create a single pane of glass monitoring for the cloud service across environments for the SaaS company. The intuitive interface also reduces the number of cloud experts the company needs on call to monitor the complex cloud infrastructure. This further reduces the operational expenses for the software house.

Taikun - Cloud manager for SaaS companies

Let’s look at few of the exceptionally useful features in Taikun that makes it perfect for a software house to streamline its cloud operations:

Taikun features perfect for SaaS companies

1: Multi-tenancy

Taikun’s inherently made to operate well in multi-organisation, multi-project and multi-cloud setups. This makes it perfect to onboard multiple tenants on a SaaS cloud setup.

All cloud setups in Taikun are linked to a Project and all projects are part of any Organization. Taikun allows admin users (called partners) to assign resources to projects.

Each project can have a type of cloud to manage. So for a Saas firm, if there is a certain kind of tenant which needs to be on-boarded on AWS while another on Google cloud - it is easily possible with Taikun.

We can also have multiple organizations within a single Taikun setup.

2: Multi-cloud environment support

Taikun has in-built support for the most popular public and private cloud companies. Currently it supports AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and OpenStack.

The best part is that with Taikun, it is very easy for its users to spawn clusters and instances, once the credentials are added to the system.

Once the cloud credentials are added to the system, the only thing any client has to focus on is access control and setting policies for its users. Taikun takes care of the rest of it.

One time setup to add cloud credentials

3: Single pane of glass

Taikun has a robust monitoring and alerting mechanism. It provides a comprehensive dashboard where one can view all the necessary details of any project. There are multiple levels of abstraction to serve all kinds of purposes.

For example, the Dashboard tab on the main page provides the highest level of overview of the entire Organization. The project tab takes it one step down by showing how the individual pods and instances are doing.

There is more granularity available when you Enable monitoring for a project.

You even look into logs from the Taikun UI using Prometheus queries.

4: Showback and Chargeback

Taikun also has Showback and Chargeback features to control and measure the number of resources consumed in each project.

Showback captures the metrics of resource usage by different users in Taikun. Chargeback focuses on the billing within an Organization. So, the SaaS company can control how much a customer spends and how many resources can it use.

These are defined by rules which help control the usage.

Example of Showback summary

5: Taikun Terraform provider

Most SaaS companies want to automate their Cloud management and deployment through their CI/CD pipeline. Terraform is a popular method of that. Taikun has excellent integration with Terraform.

You can define your Kubernetes resources in terraform files (.tf files). Taikun has a Terraform provider that can read these configuration files and then manage the cloud resources accordingly.

This method can help these SaaS companies to code the cloud deployment and management largely. The developer team can thus make cloud changes by editing configuration files and let Taikun take care fo the rest.

You can read more about Taikun Terraform provider here.

# main.tf
terraform {
  required_providers {
    taikun = {
      source = "itera-io/taikun"
      version = "1.2.0"
    }
  }
}

provider "taikun" {
  email    = var.taikun_mail
  password = var.taikun_password
}

Sample Terraform file Taikun

Conclusion

These features are just some of the ways in which software companies are able to leverage Taikun capabilities and save time and money. Taikun has been a gamechanger for many software houses.

If you would like to see how Taikun can help streamline your cloud operations, please reach out to us here.

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