Deploying Private and Managing by SaaS

New Type of SaaS Service

Consider another business scenario: B2B service providers offering products and services to customers. This is actually a challenging task within the domestic market.

• Developing SaaS solutions is often met with resistance, especially from high-net-worth customers who prefer on privatized deployment solutions.
• Privatized deployment products are costly, particularly when customization and secondary development are involved.
• The higher costs of privatized deployment are evident in operations and maintenance, especially when clients are spread across the country. This mirrors the challenges faced by enterprises with numerous branches, as previously discussed.
• Reducing costs is the only way for B2B services to survive; this is a well-known secret.

Eight offers a win-win solution for service providers who prefer SaaS and customers who prefer privatized deployment: privatized deployment with SaaS operations and maintenance. Furthermore, the powerful capabilities provided by Eight ensure cost-effective operations and maintenance.

For most high-net-worth customers, providing SSH remote login for system deployment and troubleshooting is out of the question. However, when necessary, establishing a temporary operations and maintenance management channel through secure channels (such as firewalls, network gateways, controlled proxies, etc.) for remote online support is a negotiable contract.

Alternatively, deploying Eight’s central control platform within the customer’s R&D center in a first-tier city can meet security requirements without the need for nationwide travel for maintenance issues.

In summary, service providers offering products and services to enterprises can gain new solutions by using Eight as the infrastructure. This will significantly reduce costs and bring them closer to enterprises, thereby gaining a competitive edge.

Components Accumulation and Reducing Development Costs

As mentioned earlier, the key issue in the difficulty of making enterprise application development profitable is cost. Cost is divided into two parts: development cost and operations and maintenance cost.

The previous examples showcased Eight’s tremendous potential in operations and maintenance. Now, let’s discuss Eight’s significant advantages in development.

Reviewing this topic from the beginning, the principles discussed include modules, components, changes, similar-concepts, decomposition of substances, reducing communication, parallel development, connections, and components integration. All these philosophical theories point towards one goal: developing independent and reusable components (elements).

Based on our previous chapter’s example, we saw a seat of about 60MB, where Eight’s core library occupies only a small portion, with most being commonly used third-party tool libraries. Such a jar package, although smaller than any random spring-boot micro-service, possesses versatile capabilities. According to the clues provided in our previous chapter, a complete system ready for deploying, including all MVC layers and business logic, is less than 400KB, thanks to the extensive reuse of components provided by Eight’s core library. This glimpse reveals the astonishing power of Eight’s design philosophy.

Not only is there extensive reuse of components, but as demonstrated in our previous chapter, even initially incompatible components (such as user interface and search components with dir parameters) can be easily integrated under Eight’s architecture. A service component can generate multiple instances with different parameters at runtime to link with different modules. Numerous compatible and incompatible components, if developed based on Eight’s principles, can unexpectedly construct new systems.

Ultimately, Eight is essentially a worldview and methodology: dividing substances, extracting invariance, inducting commonality, building stable components, and achieving constantly changing connections. The goal is to create a highly reusable component system, with versatile runtime systems and highly controllable remote operations and maintenance capabilities being mere by-products of achieving this goal. Eight’s elegant philosophical principles endow Java, a classical static language, with power that even dynamic languages find hard to match.

Thus, we can find a new path for enterprise applications:

• The high cost of B2B enterprise applications stems from the customization needs brought by the uniqueness of enterprise businesses. Customization leads to existing software not being fully reusable, necessitating secondary development. Non-standardized development for enterprises requires significant resources, with a narrow consumer base, unlike internet products or standardized SaaS products that rely on extensive user reuse to spread costs.
• Customized development lacks the test of long-term, widespread reuse, and its quality may not be guaranteed. Potential operations and maintenance issues can further exacerbate cost-benefit ratios.
• If standardized components, rather than standardized products, are used as the basic units, versatile capabilities can be achieved. Even though enterprises vary greatly, most share industry commonalities, albeit in different combinations.
• Whether B2B service providers or enterprises themselves, adopting Eight’s architecture can accumulate commonalities and standardized components within the industry, respond to changes, and develop more new business components. This reduces development costs as the component library grows, and component quality improves through continuous refinement.
• Component libraries within the same industry can be widely reused in vertical fields, spreading the cost of single development across broader usage.
• In this sense, B2B enterprise applications can break the cost-benefit dilemma, achieving high-quality applications at low costs.

This may indeed be the standard model for future B2B services.