ProHoster > Blog > Administration > Your Own Personal SaaS

Your Own Personal SaaS

Some historical parallels

Disclaimer: To save time TL;DR, a variation of this article is the "Potential New Trend" section.

With the development of mankind, in a certain era, people considered various material values ​​as a luxury item - precious metals, personal cold and firearms, vehicles, real estate, and so on.
Your Own Personal SaaS

The object at the KDPV is the Bugatti Type 57, a Gran Turismo class car from Bugatti Automobiles, a single high-class car for the rich. Produced in 1934-1940. It has two modifications: Type 57S and Atalante. The body design of the car was designed by Jean Bugatti.

If you look in the context of the cycle of production revolutions, then you can conditionally single out the most striking types of luxury that are included in mass trends and already further, over time, cease to seem like a luxury to us, precisely in view of their extensive distribution among the masses:

  • edged weapons and uniforms (starting with the invention of metal working methods)
    In ancient times and in the feudal era, own bladed weapons and uniforms were considered a great luxury, expensive property, opening the way to promising military service (participation in wars, mercenary armies, land seizure), power, and so on. Thus, personal weapons were a luxury.
  • private car (industrial revolution - scientific and information revolution)
    With the invention of the automobile and, in principle, to this day, the automobile is still considered a luxury. This is a thing that requires costs, investments, care, but gives a person greater freedom of movement, personal space on the road (to work, for example).

  • PC (scientific and information revolution).
    In the 1950s and 60s, computers were only available to large companies due to their size and price. Competing to increase sales, computer firms sought to reduce the cost and miniaturization of their products. For this, all modern achievements of science were used: magnetic core memory, transistors, and finally microcircuits. By 1965 the minicomputer PDP-8 occupied a volume comparable to a household refrigerator, the cost was about 20 thousand dollars, in addition, there was a trend towards further miniaturization.

    Personal computer sales were low in the late 1970s, but for a completely new product, the commercial success was overwhelming. The reason for this was the emergence of software that covered the needs of users in automating information processing. In the early 1980s, the programming language for dummies was the most popular. BASIC, text editor WordStar (whose hot key assignments are still in use today) and a spreadsheet VisiCalc, which has now grown into a giant called Excel.

    In my childhood in the 90s, PCs were also considered something cool and rarely available, not every hard-working family had a PC in their apartment.

Potential new trend

Next, I will present my vision. This is more an attempt to predict the near future than a serious analytics or a strict reasonable forecast. An attempt to be a futurist based on my own indirect observable signs and intuitions in the field of IT.

So, in the age of information development, the widespread participation of computers in our lives, I see an emerging luxury personal SaaS. That is, a service made and working purely for the needs of a particular person (or a narrow group of people, for example, a family, a group of friends). It is not hosted by Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other giants of the IT industry. It was either self-produced "into production" by the user himself, or ordered or bought for a considerable amount from some contractor, such as a freelancer.

Examples, prerequisites and indirect signs:

  • there are people who are unhappy SaaS. Not a business, but just individuals or groups of people. There will be no statistics here, just complaints from individuals in the same news and technical articles by major market players (Yandex, Google, Microsoft). The hosts of IT podcasts also share their pain and demonstrate their critical attitude towards SaaS-am.
  • examples with large companies removing their services
  • examples with information security, data leakage, data loss, fakapy
  • paranoia or justified reluctance to share your Personal Data
  • the value of personal data and personal comfort online are becoming more critical for individuals; this data is very valuable and only becomes more expensive for any business that greedily and aggressively hunts for this personal data (targeted advertising, imposed services and tariffs of a dubious nature, as well as hackers are probably the main threats in this regard)
  • appearance in Open Source solutions for ever larger applications: from personal notes to financial accounting and personal file cloud.

  • trite own scenarios that push me at least to search and explore the possibilities of existing Open Source decisions.

    For example, recently I've been thinking hard about hosting a note-taking service on my own, available to me online through a mobile phone or desktop. The choice of the best solution is still in the process, I am interested in an easily deployable solution with minimal notes storage functionality and protection (for example, Basic Auth). Also, I wish the solution could be run as Docker container, which simply maximizes the speed and convenience of deployment for me personally. I would be happy with recommendations in the comments. Since so far the hand reaches for the keyboard and IDE write such a simple service yourself.

Conclusions and consequences

Based on this assumption of a growing trend, a number of conclusions can be drawn:

  • this is a potential promising niche. It seems to me that this is an opportunity to build or rebuild an IT or media services business and sell customized solutions. Here it is important to reach out to customers who consider personal SaaS as a luxury, who are ready to pay for this above the market, in exchange for receiving some good guarantees of the services provided.
  • the development of such solutions is not easy, expensive, in fact, this is a separate technical specification for each order. In fact, this cannot be considered some new niche or business model. In fact, this is probably what many companies have grown up with with their products, or outsourcing companies, just leading such development according to individual requirements.
  • you can go the other way, and for example, if you are a developer, then enter Open Source just in the area of ​​​​development of such solutions - select some kind of problem, find existing projects, become a contributor there. Or, start running your own project on a public hosting of repositories from scratch for a specific problem and build up a community of users and contributors around it.
  • the load profile of such an application and the requirements are different from all those public SaaS services that are designed for simultaneous mass use. For example, if there is only one user, you don't need a system that can support thousands of connections or process millions of requests per second. Of course, speed and fault tolerance also remain necessary - the service must be able to reserve its subsystems, respond quickly, be able to make and restore data backups. All this means that you can focus on other things when designing and developing, sacrificing scalability, performance, concentrating, for example, on the speed of introducing new features or, for example, ensuring the highest possible consistency or data protection.

bonus

Below I will provide links to useful projects, interesting articles:

Source: habr.com

Add a comment