Helping SaaS companies run reliably on Google Cloud

Two years ago, we announced Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) with the aim to share operational fate with our customers and give them more control over the critical applications they're entrusting to us.

Since then we’ve worked with a number of companies, and we’ve seen that the more systems a business has collected, inherited, or acquired, the greater its operational burden. These businesses often know that moving to the cloud can decrease that burden, offering them security, scalability, and cost benefits, but worry that those benefits come at the expense of control. In our experience, Site Reliability Engineering best practices can greatly reduce this anxiety while simultaneously increasing release velocity and reliability. That’s why we’re constantly looking for ways to engage with more customers, all while still ensuring each relationship is high quality and meaningful.

Introducing CRE for SaaS Partners

One way we’re doing this is by launching new programs like our recently announced CRE for SaaS Partners, part of our larger SaaS Initiative. Our SaaS partners, just like our customers, have the same challenges running reliably while maintaining release velocity. But SaaS companies that serve business customers have reliability needs that are far more defined than most other customers. Not only have they agreed to provide specific SLAs to their 1st-order customers, but those customers often serve different, 2nd-order customers and end users who also have additional SLAs promised to them.

In addition, many of the customers served by our SaaS partners implement their products in unexpected ways, which turns our SaaS partners effectively into platform companies. This can be problematic for our SaaS partners since they have little visibility into how their products are being consumed. Fortunately, helping platform providers gain insight into the applications they host to better reach reliability targets is exactly what CRE was built to do—and we’d like nothing more than to help SaaS partners externalize it to their customers.

Amplifying the impact of CRE

Working with our SaaS partners to establish and reach reliability targets for their platforms encourages CRE to build tooling and processes that are applicable to a broader audience of customers. This effort is a major step closer to fulfilling our larger mission to help all of our customers achieve Google-level reliability on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

As we mentioned earlier, CRE for SaaS partners is a benefit of our larger SaaS Initiative that we announced at Next’18 in July. If you’re a SaaS company either serving business customers today or are building a new SaaS solution, we’d love to help you not only run your products reliably, at scale, but also become a more reliable business. Ask your partner manager about how you can apply for this benefit. If you’re not a SaaS partner, you can become one here.

Reliability is a partnership and we want to go on this journey with you.