https://ferkakta.dev/tags/saas/Recent content in Saas on ferkakta.devHugoen-USCopyright fizz.Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://ferkakta.dev/onboarding-flow-architecture-report-card/Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://ferkakta.dev/onboarding-flow-architecture-report-card/<p>I ran a colleague&rsquo;s manual tenant onboarding flow for a multi-tenant SaaS platform. Five steps, two attempts, and a list of errors that mapped precisely to every automation gap in the system. The onboarding flow wasn&rsquo;t broken. It was a diagnostic.</p> <h2 id="the-five-steps">The five steps</h2> <p>The flow to bring a new tenant from nothing to working:</p> <ol> <li>Run a Python registration script that calls the auth-handler API, creates an org in the identity provider, and sends a confirmation email to the devops team.</li> <li>Read the devops email. Manually extract two values: a tenant hash and an org code.</li> <li>Run populate scripts that seed 38 SSM parameters — 24 for <code>apiserver</code>, 14 for <code>tenant-auth-service</code>.</li> <li>Trigger a GitHub Actions workflow. Terraform creates the namespace, deployments, ExternalSecrets, DNS records, HTTPS.</li> <li>Manually apply Kubernetes jobs for ETL seed data and first-user creation.</li> </ol> <p>Step 4 is automated. Steps 1, 2, 3, and 5 are manual. The manual steps are where the architecture&rsquo;s seams show.</p>