Demand for software as a service is insatiable; companies want to serve it, and customers want to devour it. No wonder technology providers have to remind aspirants to catch their breath, look at what goes into SaaS business models and move ahead in doable steps.

“There’s no one size fits all for SaaS,” said Craig Wicks (pictured, left), senior manager of the AWS SaaS Factory at Amazon Web Services Inc., a global network of SaaS experts.

This may disappoint those hoping to just buy some cloud development software and push a SaaS button. The main speed bump for many comes in the realization that SaaS isn’t just a recurring-revenue product or application; it’s a business model that can take effort to adapt to. Also, it takes forms as diverse as the companies adopting it, requiring ground-up planning and building, not just a software shopping trip.

Operating a subscription software service changes the dynamics how you deliver and how you engage with customers. “Who’s answering the pager now if something goes wrong? It’s not your customer, it’s you, and you have to manage and sustain that service and really continue to provide innovation and value to customers,” Wicks said.

Wicks and Tod Golding (pictured, right), principal cloud architect and global SaaS tech lead at AWS, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the hard parts of building and running SaaS and some ways to make it all a bit easier. (* Disclosure below.)

The incremental advantage: customer input

Businesses moving to SaaS can’t escape the toil of adapting their business model and working out the details of their service. The good news is that technology can help them quickly stand up what they need once they figure it out. And they do not have to adopt applications that are foreign to them right out of the gate.

“We’re trying to put [customers] in a position where they can incrementally modernize their applications while still realizing the benefits of getting to market on a SaaS model,” Golding said.

This means shifting a monolithic application into whatever environment enables it to go SaaS the soonest. This might mean cloud; it might mean containers. More importantly, they will have tools for operational efficiency, DevOps, frictionless onboarding and analytics key to successful SaaS functioning, according to Golding.

Another reason why the SaaS button doesn’t exist: SaaS business models evolve over time just like all others, and probably more so. As they do, the technology will have to change as well.

“Really good organizations will say: We’re going to invest in all the metrics and all the analytics — all the tooling that lets us really have our finger on the pulse of what our customers are doing. And then they’ll drive all their tech and their business strategy based on this really data-driven experience,” Golding said.

To take some of the pain out of SaaS, AWS SaaS Factory offers tools for metrics and analytics, as well as billing in AWS SaaS Boost, an open-source reference environment users install and plug into their AWS account.

For educational purposes, the SaaS Factory insights hub has over 70 pieces of published content, including best practices in tenant isolation, case studies and more.

Perfecting SaaS incrementally also allows for the use of the most important ingredient — customer feedback. “You can put customers in experience and have them evaluate your technology in a manner where they can have a trial experience in a way that really introduces them to technology very slowly, and they grow over time,” Wicks concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: The AWS Partner Network sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE