The SaaS industry has grown tremendously these past couple of years but with that growth comes the ever demanding question to analyse that data.

Most SaaS solutions bring their own “analytics” plugin, at a hefty sum in most cases, but are still operating in silos (you usually can’t upload your own data in the SaaS solution). So how do we break the silos? By getting all the data in one location.

But how do we do this? Will we code everything from scratch or do we look at the world of services that cloud providers offer? In most cases the discussion is about speed of delivery versus the availability of programmers. It’s a healthy practice to be objective on the quality of the service before you start from scratch. So, let’s see if AppFlow is an awesome tool or a complete disaster.

AWS AppFlow: An intro

AWS AppFlow is a relative new service, introduced on the 22nd of April 2020 and is used to get SaaS data into the AWS platform.

A full architecture of AWS AppFlow is described by Amazon in the below picture.

AppFlow Architecture

Quickly summed up, you have a source, you can do some operations on the fields and then you write it to a destination. Looks simple enough right? In the next sections we will use a real-life example to highlight the different sections of this architectural drawing.

Google Analytics data in AWS

In the following sections we will work out a use case that sources data from Google Analytics and writes it to AWS RDS.

Setup Access to Google

Before we can actually do something we will need a user account on Google Cloud to be able to interact with their API. So let’s set that up first (the instructions were taken from the AWS documentation page).

#saas #aws #google-analytics #data analytic