AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
ISVs on AWS – January 2017 Highlights
By Terry Wise, Global Vice President, Channels & Alliances at AWS
As VP, Channels & Alliances for AWS, I have the great fortune of getting to meet with APN Partners from around the world who, through their innovative use of AWS and forward-thinking approach to software development, are fundamentally changing the way that Enterprise customers take advantage of software and tooling to drive digital transformation and business outcomes. A key highlight for me this past year was getting to meet with a large number of our APN Technology Partners, who provide software solutions that are either hosted on or integrate with AWS, and learn how they’ve been able to take advantage of new selling avenues and opportunities not previously possible.
Today, the APN is comprised of thousands of Technology Partners around the world. Our Technology Partner base is growing rapidly year-over-year, as more and more ISVs look to take advantage of the benefits of deploying their software on AWS, particularly as software as a service (SaaS). ISVs on AWS are changing the way they bring value to customers particularly through their embrace of DevOps and automation, and development of SaaS.
To help you learn more about the different ways ISVs are driving success for customers on AWS, this year we’re kicking off a new monthly blog series where we highlight four to five ISVs who are consistently evolving their solutions by taking advantage of what AWS has to offer. Today, I’m excited to kick our series off by highlighting four AWS Technology Partners who’ve deployed SaaS solutions on AWS: Codeship, CrowdStrike, Freshdesk, and Loggly.
Codeship, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner
Who is Codeship?
Codeship’s vision is simple: to build for the builders. “We want to enable software engineers, designers, and everybody who wants to craft great software by providing them with the means to speed up their development workflows, learn from their users and create better products faster,” says Moritz Plassnig, CEO/Founder of Codeship.
What has Codeship built?
The company’s current product offering is a cloud-native, hosted Continuous Integration & Delivery platform. The product tests and deploys the code your software teams create on optimized, dedicated infrastructure in the cloud, thus letting you outsource one of the most time consuming by-products of creating quality software. “With Codeship, you can get a fully managed SaaS platform that offers adaptability and customizability, freeing up valuable engineering resources to dedicate them to what they are used best on: Your product,” explains Plassnig.
Why AWS?
“Nothing is more important to an early-stage startup than iterating and moving fast. It’s all about building something your first customers will truly love. To achieve that, you have to focus on the customer one-hundred percent. Everything you do should get you closer to that magical moment where your early users are unbelievably amazed by your product. Spending even a single second on building the underlying infrastructure instead of using AWS makes zero sense for us. AWS allows us to focus on delighting our customer, and gives us the peace of mind that our infrastructure will be taken take of,” says Jim Schley, VP Engineering at Codeship. The company’s SaaS solution integrates with multiple AWS services including Amazon EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS), and AWS CodeDeploy.
Customers on AWS
Codeship has driven success for many customers on AWS across multiple industries, such as Digital Media, Financial Services, Retail and Software. One of Codeship’s customers is CloudSight, a company specializing in image recognition and mobile visual search who offers an image recognition API and built a cutting-edge tech stack to support their customers. The company uses Codeship to leverage multiple microservices, Docker, and Amazon ECS.
How can customers, and APN Partners, get started using Codeship?
Because Codeship’s product is offered as SaaS, it’s easy to get started. Go to codeship.com, create a free account, spend a couple of minutes configuring your testing environment and project settings, and then you’re ready to go. Codeship offers a free tier for all of its products that allow developers to try the product out extensively before committing to a paid plan.
Want to learn more?
Codeship runs a highly trafficked blog featuring great technical content and thought leadership pieces. You can view the blog at blog.codeship.com.
The company also offers a wide range of free educational resources including eBooks and webinars in the Codeship Library.
CrowdStrike
Who is CrowdStrike?
CrowdStrike’s mission is straightforward: to stop breaches. “When CrowdStrike was started in 2011, there were a ton of headlines about security breaches that couldn’t be solved by existing malware-based defenses. Our co-founders realized that a brand new approach was needed, so they created Falcon Host. Falcon is all about detecting threats that were previously undetectable. 6 years later, CrowdStrike sees over 27 billion endpoint events a day. All of those events get analyzed by CrowdStrike Threat Graph™, the brain that powers CrowdStrike Falcon,” says Josh Karp, Director of Global Technology Alliances at CrowdStrike.
What has CrowdStrike built?
CrowdStrike is a pioneer in next-generation endpoint protection, and unifies three crucial elements for customers: next-generation antivirus, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and a 24/7 managed hunting service — uniquely delivered via the cloud in a single lightweight sensor. CrowdStrike’s SaaS-based Falcon™ platform stops breaches by preventing and responding to all types of attacks– both malware and malware-free. The Falcon platform uses the patent-pending CrowdStrike Threat Graph™ to analyze and correlate billions of events in real time, providing complete protection and five-second visibility across all endpoints.
CrowdStrike Falcon was designed for the Cloud from the ground up. To deliver deep threat visibility for its global customer base, CrowdStrike Falcon leverages AWS secure cloud infrastructure. In addition to protecting on-premises endpoints, CrowdStrike Falcon Host also provides real-time protection and visibility for workloads running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to help organizations stop breaches. The lightweight Falcon sensor can be installed on both Windows and Linux operating systems hosted in EC2 in a matter of minutes. Watch this video to learn how to deploy CrowdStrike Falcon Host on Amazon EC2.
Why AWS?
“At CrowdStrike, we consider AWS to be a gold standard in cloud computing and we feel Falcon’s native cloud architecture is a perfect fit for customers moving their workloads to AWS. As we see more and more customers moving to the cloud, they are looking for a way to further protect their data and their endpoints. Deploying our SaaS-based endpoint protection platform gives those customers immediate visibility and threat protection,” says Karp.
“Working with AWS has been very rewarding,” explains Karp. “As an Advanced APN Partner, CrowdStrike has earned recognition for its rich set of APIs and has access to a variety of training, educational, and support resources.”
Customers on AWS
The CrowdStrike solution is offered as a subscription-based software as a service (SaaS) which means there is no hardware or software to install enabling rapid time-to-value for the company’s customers. Read a number of customer case studies here to learn more about how customers are using CrowdStrike.
How can customers, and APN Partners, get started using CrowdStrike?
To get started deploying CrowdStrike Falcon on AWS, visit Crowdstrike’s website here to request more information and a live demo.
“We work closely with firms, such as Systems Integrators to ensure our mutual customers receive expert advice to proactively reduce their cyber risks and provide immediate access to an accredited cyber security firm in the event of a compromise,” explains Karp. APN Consulting Partners looking to enable CrowdStrike for their customers can fill out this contact form.
Want to learn more?
For more information, click here.
Freshdesk, an AWS Marketing & Commerce Competency Partner
Who is Freshdesk?
Freshdesk is a leading cloud-based customer engagement solution that enables teams of all sizes to provide exceptional experiences to their customers. “We are laser focused on improving the entire customer support process and helping end-users engage with their favorite companies and brands more easily,” says Francesco Rovetta, VP of Alliances at Freshdesk.
What has Freshdesk built?
“Our flagship SaaS customer service solution, Freshdesk, was first released in 2011 and serves as a platform for our customers to find more and better ways to connect with their customers and the community,” explains Rovetta. Freshdesk is a multi-channel customer support solution: companies using Freshdesk are able to manage customer inquiries across channels, email, phone, social media, the Web, mobile apps and chat, in one central dashboard. It also enables customers to help themselves and each other by accessing a knowledge base and forums with customized content. “Our helpdesk is available both on the web and as a mobile application. It is easy to customize, includes built-in automations, integrations with many leading SaaS products and a complete set of APIs,” says Rovetta.
The company has four total products running on AWS. In addition to Freshdesk are Freshservice, a cloud-based service desk and IT service management solution; Hotline.io, an in-app support and engagement platform for mobile-first businesses; and Freshsales, a CRM solution and sales system for high-velocity sales teams.
Why AWS?
“We are an early adopter of AWS,” Rovetta explains. “Our main criteria for deploying the AWS Cloud were the infrastructure availability and scalability it offers with minimum latency. With these factors in mind, we transitioned to the AWS Cloud. The entire process took just a couple of weeks with zero downtime. Being able to get the job done quickly was a major factor in our ability to grow.” The company has experienced numerous benefits by moving to and running its SaaS solution on AWS. “With the help of AWS, we were able to quickly scale up millions of data points for thousands of businesses when our customer base grew exponentially. This would have certainly been a challenge with any other architecture,” says Rovetta. “In addition to the many instances we have in place today, when we reach high load, we can effortlessly increase capacity to handle the current load event. This makes it easier to handle large customers with more than 1,500 support agents. This kind of iteration at the hardware level is one of the greatest features of AWS, and it is only possible because AWS can provision (and deprovision) instances quickly.”
AWS further addressed Freshdesk’s concerns pertaining to security and data theft. “AWS certifications and architecture are top notch and they help us eliminate security gaps against possible breaches, dramatically reducing complexity and helping us shift focus to innovation without worrying about security threats,” says Rovetta.
Customers on AWS
A key customer for Freshdesk is Bridgestone Corporation, the world’s largest tire production and distribution company. “When looking at solutions, our use of AWS swung the needle in Freshdesk’s favor,” says Rovetta. Read more about Bridgestone and Freshdesk here.
How can customers, and APN Partners, get started using Freshdesk?
Customers interested in a free 30 day trial can visit https://freshdesk.com/signup.
Freshdesk’s core focus is to build innovative products, and the company often comes across projects that require integration and implementation service work into the infrastructure of larger customers. “In these cases, we work with System Integration Partners to support our customers’ implementation needs,” says Rovetta. APN Consulting Partners can add AWS-powered Freshdesk to their portfolio, as they support customers in their move to the Cloud or during their transition to a modern SaaS customer support solution. More information can be found at https://freshdesk.com/resellers/reseller-benefits.
Want to learn more?
Visit the company’s website to learn more about getting started with Freshdesk.
Loggly, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner
Who is Loggly?
The team at Loggly focuses on empowering companies to gain insight from huge volumes of log data. The Loggly SaaS service makes it easy to collect, access and analyze mission-critical information in one place, accelerating troubleshooting, giving AWS customers a window into the health of their systems and revealing valuable business insights based on log data.
What has Loggly built?
“In the old days, log data was usually stored on local machines and could only be accessed by a few engineers,” says John Elkaim, vice president of marketing at Loggly. “Developers and sysadmins used tools like grep to analyze system logs from a single server and get that server back to health. In today’s world of distributed systems running in elastic cloud environments, companies need to take a much smarter and more efficient approach. The number of components generating log data and the volume of that data have exploded. People in development, DevOps, and technical support need to be able to see all logs from all systems in context, collaborate, share information, and quickly pull in subject matter experts when analyzing log data. The value of log management is measured not just by server uptime but by innovation speed and revenue impact.”
AWS logs are an integral part of understanding how applications run on AWS. Loggly offers agent-free log collection for a wide range of systems, applications, and Amazon services including Amazon CloudFront, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch logs, Amazon CloudWatch metrics, AWS Config, Amazon EC2, Amazon ELB logs, Amazon S3 logs, and Amazon SNS. Loggly customers can also permanently archive logs to Amazon S3 instances.
Loggly offers Application Packs for AWS CloudTrail and Amazon Classic ELB. These are pre-built dashboards and pre-set search patterns that help customers get immediate insights from the AWS logs they send to Loggly. Loggly recently published blog posts on the ELB Application Pack and the AWS CloudTrail Application Pack.
Why AWS?
“The relationship with AWS is crucial for Loggly, on both the technology and the business side. The powerful and continuously evolving technology offered by AWS, in combination with an excellent team, has helped Loggly to develop a first-class SaaS solution for our customers, most of whom are themselves AWS users,” says Elkaim. Loggly also found AWS to be key to building and deploying a successful SaaS solution. “Loggly is mission critical for thousands of customers around the globe, and that is why high availability and scalability are absolute must-haves for our SaaS solution,” says Manoj Chaudhary, CTO and vice president of engineering at Loggly. “AWS technologies like Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon RDS, and Amazon Route 53 make us stronger in these areas and do so much more efficiently than we could do ourselves. As a result, we can focus on what we know best: log management and analytics, our core competencies.”
Customers on AWS
Joint customers include Bemobi, Creative Market, Molecule, XAPPmedia, and Citymaps.
How can customers, and APN Partners, get started using Loggly?
Loggly offers a free tier and doesn’t require agents. Just sign up for free at loggly.com and configure your systems to start sending log data. Most AWS customers are able to do so within minutes.
The Loggly team feels that APN Consulting Partners can bring a lot of value to customers in helping them harness log data to drive success. “If your clients are embracing the vision of virtual capacity anytime and anywhere, complex microservices, elastic cloud capacity, or serverless architectures, they need a solid monitoring strategy that includes log management,” Elkaim adds. “We believe log data is the single common thread that reveals how users engage with applications, how components interact, and how complex systems perform. Operating software without a systematic approach to log management is like flying blind.”
Want to learn more?
Click here to learn more about log management with Loggly.