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As much as we’d wish, technology is never one-size-fits-all. And for SaaS companies, making the wrong choices in your tech stack can be detrimental to growth. Whether you’re a startup looking to grow fast, or an established technology company that’s running into the limits of your technology platform.
Luckily, a technology-agnostic approach can help you downsize the risks of a suboptimal tech stack. In this article, you’ll what it means to be technology-agnostic, and which steps you can take to build a flexible tech stack, resilient to change.
There’s no single tool, software or group of tools that can do it all. Being technology-agnostic means that your development team isn’t limited to using one specific technology, framework, or programming language. Instead, developers can mix and match different technologies, frameworks or software to build apps that fully meet their customers’ needs.
A tech-agnostic approach gives your developers much more freedom and flexibility. In the past, IT teams would choose new tooling carefully in order to fit their existing tech stack. In other words, they build a solution with the tools they have.
With today’s technology-agnostic approaches, it’s the other way around. Developers envision the solution they want to build, and pick the tech that will help them build it.
Imagine you’re building an app on Microsoft Azure. As you start to build out your application, you’re adding on more tools and infrastructure, like a database management system to store all your data, programming libraries for front-end and back-end, testing and security tools, and maybe you want to connect some third-party services via API.
Since your app is already running on Azure, you decide to build out your tech stack with other Microsoft-specific tools and features. At some point, your Microsoft stack doesn’t support nor integrate one very specific feature you need. Or one specific feature gets deprecated, and there’s no replacement within the Microsoft stack.
So you’re facing a dilemma: redoing your entire tech stack to be able to integrate that one specific feature, or deciding not to build that feature, even if your customers dearly need it.
Situations like these are an unfortunate reality. Not to say that Microsoft and other huge vendors like AWS or Google are a bad choice for your stack. This example just goes to show how important it is to think about the problems you want to solve, rather than trying to cover all ground with a single technology or service provider.
By taking a vendor-agnostic approach to building out your software product, you can easily overcome the risks of lock-in and lengthy migrations. Let’s look at some of the benefits of being tech-agnostic for SaaS teams.
Avoid vendor lock-in
Using tech-agnostic software solutions and frameworks means you’re no longer heavily dependent on one technology partner. You avoid the risk of having to deal with lengthy, costly tech migrations.
More flexibility
As you identify new pain points your SaaS product could solve, you will have more flexibility in the ways you build your solution to that problem. With a tech-agnostic stack, you can easily integrate new tooling, programming languages and frameworks.
More innovation
If you make the tech stack fit the problem, instead of the other way around, you will foster creative problem-solving. Your teams will have more freedom to think outside the box, leading to more innovation.
More resilience
What if your main technology gets deprecated? Or it experiences a massive outage? Or a data breach? Many problems can arise if your SaaS product fully depends on a single technology. Tech-agnostic offerings can adapt much better to quickly changing circumstances, and can integrate ground-breaking new technologies faster.
Lower costs
With more technology options to choose from, your developers can make cost-effective choices. They can hand-pick the tools that will generate the most ROI at the lowest cost (which doesn’t necessarily equal the cheapest option).
Interoperability
You don’t need to build everything on the same stack in order to have a seamless experience. Tech-agnostic SaaS products were built for seamless integration with other technologies or applications, regardless of which technology stack they use.
Being technology-agnostic is not just about the platforms you use. By using the right software development strategies or frameworks, you can get one step closer to building solid foundations for your app, that aren’t heavily reliant on a specific tech.
Developing the API first - and the visual interface later - will lead to a more flexible software solution. It separates the frontend from the backend, and so you can swap the technology they run on independently if needed.
Using open source frameworks and code can help you avoid vendor lock-in. They are free, and maintained by the community, which gives you more freedom and flexibility. However, likewise, relying on a single open-source software also comes with risks.
By dividing your app into smaller parts - or modules - you can separate different functionalities, test and manage them independently, and even swap them out without impacting other parts of your application.
A composable architecture has the same advantage of breaking down a large app into smaller components that you can manage separately. On top of that, you can also easily recompose them, and let these components deeply interact with each other.
Microservices are small services or components that you can deploy independently, in any tech stack of your choice. They are a popular way to implement a composable architecture.
Technology evolves fast, with new frameworks and vendors popping up daily. To put your customer’s problems at the forefront - and technology in a supporting role - a tech-agnostic approach to product development will help you do just that.
With the strategies pointed out above, you’re well on your way to building flexible applications that will stand the test of time, and can keep up with the pace of technological change.
At Luzmo, we strongly believe in a tech-agnostic approach. Our composable building block for dashboards is easily embeddable into any SaaS platform. No matter the programming languages, cloud providers or data stack you use.
If you’re looking to add beautiful, interactive client-facing reporting to your next software project, without lock-in or lots of overhead, try out Luzmo today with a free 10-day trial!
Experience the power of Luzmo. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.
