I'm using this type of simple approach to build a SaaS right now. We need to spin up many VPS and provision them, and the fastest way to do that is with rsync and ssh.

But we didn't stop there: this SaaS for our open source browser product is entirely built like this^0: behind the scenes it's a collection of bash scripts that implement and execute the business operation of the SaaS.

So basically, it's a command-line interface to the SaaS. Think of it this way, say I didn't have a website, with login, and "click a button to open a browser", but instead people would write me letters, send me cheques, or call me on the phone. Then I can serve their requests manually, at the command line.

The reason I made it like this was:

- clear separation between thin web front-end and actual business logic

- nice command-line interface (options, usage, help, clear error messages) to business logic for maintenance and support to jump on and fix things

- inheritance of operating system permissions and user process isolation

- highly testable implementation

Maybe this is dumb, but I really like it. To me it's an architecture and approach that makes sense.

I'm sure this is not new, and I think a lot of good quality operations must be built via this way. I highly align with the author's stance of the composition of a few simple command line tools to get the job done.

Perhaps we can call this "unix driven development", or "unix-philosophy backend engineering"

0: https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserBoxPro (saas coming soonish)