HACKER Q&A
📣 yogiAtAI

Would a SaaS control plane scaffolding tool be useful?


I've been working on a tool that auto generates the control plane and parts of the application plane for SAAS apps. It aims to provide a huge chunk of the control plane (authorization, tenancy etc) and simplify the initial build of a saas app or platform. Users input basic details about their SaaS app, such as the name, organization and customer tiers. CloudMural then generates an architecture diagram using standard AWS symbols, providing a clear visual of the proposed infrastructure. Initial architecture diagram represents the control plane for the selected tenancy model (siloed, pooled, hybrid) and business type (b2c, b2b, b2b2c). The user can then drag supported aws services into the work area to represent things like ECS services, database tables etc. Once the user is done, the tool scaffolds out the entire infrastructure in AWS. For user specified services, it also scaffolds out github repositories. I'm planning on adding github actions support for CI/CD as well. I'm also going to add support for scaffolding a react-native app, landing page and an admin dashboard. The UI will come in set up with auth & auth via cognito. Please see pictures here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQbCZN2QclCE9CcSt2LHM4SVChlxPOXhyHSlGTZXzBYHmSGjmoMdLfm-XO5oHpnMZ0DSCmG8-VD-lx9/pub

Question to the community is, would y'all find this tool useful? I do have plans to publish it and maybe sell it as a SAAS product/platform bootstrapper, but I'd like to get feedback from the community as to its usefulness. I'd also appreciate any thoughts/changes/feedback.

Thanks and much appreciated!


  👤 ac2u Accepted Answer ✓
In my humble opinion, no vendor making such a tool will ever cover the level of customisation for edge cases needed for my own preferences.

However, that's not to say it can't provide a lot of value, but the value is probably better captured by yourself in saving tonnes of time in scaffolding new projects as part of an agency business. If it saved you even a day of labour every time a new project gets set up, that's more time for hiring/marketing etc.