SaaS Everywhere: Dedicated SaaS Instances at the Push of a Button

The classic SaaS model is simple: one cloud, one architecture, all customers share the resources. However, as a SaaS provider becomes more successful in the enterprise segment, a phrase is often heard in sales conversations: “We love your software, but for compliance reasons, the data must reside in our own Azure tenant (or on-premise).”

For many SaaS teams, this is the moment when scaling breaks. Suddenly, “special solutions” need to be maintained, manually installed, and painstakingly updated. Polycrate resolves this dilemma by decoupling application logic from infrastructure.

The Problem: The “Private Cloud” Trap

Operating an instance outside of one’s own environment presents significant operational challenges:

• Inconsistency: The installation at the customer’s site looks different from internal production. Errors are hard to reproduce.
• Update Hell: If you have 50 customers with their own instances, your ops team spends half their time manually patching foreign environments.
• No Access: In foreign clouds, familiar monitoring and backup tools are often missing, making support a blind flight.

The Solution: Polycrate as a “Shipping Container” for Your Software

With Polycrate, you package your SaaS service into a standardized block. This block contains not only the code but also the knowledge of how the surrounding infrastructure (databases, ingress, monitoring) should look.

1. True Provider Agnosticism

Since Polycrate blocks unify various tools (Terraform, Helm, Ansible) under one roof, you can use the same block to operate your app at AWS or install it on a bare Linux server at the customer’s site. The actions (install, update, health-check) remain identical.

2. White-Labeling at the Push of a Button

Need to adjust logos, colors, or API endpoints for a major customer? In Polycrate, you control these variations through simple configuration parameters in the workspace without altering the underlying code.

3. Remote Operations & Monitoring

The Polycrate Operator can also run in the customer’s environment. It securely reports the status of the instance (certificates, backup status, version) back to your central Polycrate API. This way, you maintain control even if the data physically resides elsewhere.

The Strategic Advantage: Enterprise-Ready in Record Time

With this architecture, SaaS providers gain a decisive competitive advantage:

• Larger Market Segment: You can acquire customers who strictly reject “Public SaaS” (e.g., government agencies, banks, healthcare).
• Higher Margins: Dedicated instances (“Private SaaS”) can often be sold at significantly higher prices than standard accounts.
• Minimal OPEX: Despite individual deployments, operational effort remains low as all instances follow the same automated lifecycle.

Conclusion: Rethinking Software Distribution

In 2026, the SaaS provider who responds most flexibly to their customers’ infrastructure needs will win. Polycrate makes your service portable and transforms the “annoying customer instance” into a scalable, automated process. Deliver your software where your customers need it—without sacrificing your own architecture.

Technical FAQ: Custom Deployments

How do we handle different Kubernetes versions at the customer’s site? Polycrate blocks can contain version checks. You define the minimum requirements in the block. If the customer’s environment doesn’t fit, the action aborts before an inconsistent state arises.

Do we have to give the customer our Polycrate code? Not necessarily. You can deliver the finished blocks as versioned artifacts. The customer only sees the result, while your operational intelligence remains encapsulated in the block.

How does updating a remote instance work? Through your CI/CD pipeline, you call the Polycrate action update on the remote target. Since Polycrate can communicate via standardized tunnels or APIs, updating an instance in Singapore feels the same as updating on your local server.