What is a SaaS stack?
A SaaS stack is a collection of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and tools that are used across an organization. While the specific contents of any SaaS stack will vary depending on the nature of the business, it will typically consist of communication, collaboration, sales, marketing, HR, finance and data analytics software.
Related Definitions
SaaS Sprawl
What is SaaS sprawl?
SaaS sprawl, also known as software sprawl, occurs when an organization’s SaaS stack consists of a large — and often unmanageable — number of applications.
Ultimately, as business needs grow, the number of digital tools required increases, which leads to new applications being subscribed to, be this through a centralized process or at the will of individual employees.
Overages
What are overages in SaaS?
In SaaS, overages refer to the additional costs or fees that are incurred when a user exceeds the contracted usage limits or terms of their plan. Examples of overages include user overages, storage overages, API usage overages, feature overages and support overages.
Tail Spend
What is tail spend?
Tail spend refers to the unmanaged purchases made within an organization that fail to pass through an official procurement process. On account of their low value, the costs incurred by these purchases are seldom monitored by financing teams as they are generally too small to be deemed “strategic”. The problem, however, is that they can make up as much as 20% of a business’ total spend.
Master Service Agreement (MSA)
What is a Master Service Agreement?
A Master Service Agreement (MSA) is a contract between two parties, in this case the software provider and the buyer, outlining the terms and conditions of the agreement. It will typically cover pricing, payment terms, service levels, intellectual property rights, confidentiality, liability, termination, and dispute resolution.
Unlike a service level agreement (SLA) which outlines the specific performance metrics and criteria for the delivery of a particular service, for example uptime guarantees and support response times, an MSA covers the broader terms of the business relationship.
Spot Instances
What are spot instances?
As with any cloud service provider, AWS will have spare capacity available to support surges in customer demand. To offset the loss, AWS offers this excess EC2 capacity – in other words, spot instances – at a heavily discounted rate.
To benefit from these spot instances, users must bid on this unused EC2 capacity in their desired region. The capacity is then allocated to the highest bidder. While it can be a great way to reduce costs by as much as 90%, it is only suitable for workloads that can tolerate interruptions and don’t require continuous availability. This is because AWS will terminate the instance after a two-minute notification in the event that it needs to reclaim the resources, or because the spot price exceeds the bid price. In other words, when other customers are willing to pay more.
Cloud Instances
What is an instance in the context of cloud computing?
In cloud computing, an instance refers to a virtual server provided by a third-party cloud service, for example AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. These instances ultimately enable companies to deploy and run their applications or services in the cloud, in a scalable and flexible manner. This is because instances are on-demand and can be adjusted based on your workload requirements.