Category: AWS Marketplace

This is a guest post from Udi Nachmany, Head of Public Cloud at Canonical. Canonical is an Advanced APN Technology Partner. 

Ubuntu has long been popular with users of AWS, due to its stability, regular cadence of releases, and scaleout-friendly usage model. Canonical, an Advanced APN Technology Partner, optimizes, builds, and regularly publishes the latest Ubuntu images to the Amazon EC2 console and AWS Marketplace, which is designed to provide an optimal Ubuntu experience for developers who are using AWS Cloud services. At AWS re:Invent 2016, Canonical will augment that experience with the added stability, security, and efficiency enterprise users require, by launching its enterprise support package for Ubuntu, Ubuntu Advantage, on AWS Marketplace.

Ubuntu Advantage Virtual Guest is designed for virtualized enterprise workloads on AWS, which use official Ubuntu images. It is the professional package of tooling, technology, and expertise from Canonical, and helps organizations around the world manage their Ubuntu deployments. Ubuntu Advantage Virtual Guest includes:

• Access to Landscape (SaaS version), the systems management tool for using Ubuntu at scale
• Canonical Livepatch Service, which allows you to apply critical kernel patches without rebooting on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS images using the Linux 4.4 kernel
• Up to 24×7 telephone and web support
• Access to the Canonical Knowledge Hub, and regular security bug fixes

The added benefits of accessing Ubuntu Advantage through the AWS Marketplace SaaS subscription model are hourly pricing rates based on the size of your actual Ubuntu usage on AWS, and centralized billing through your existing AWS Marketplace account. Ubuntu Enterprise Support is available in two tiers: Standard and Advanced.You can learn about the difference in support levels here.

At re:Invent, you will also be able to learn more about Canonical’s innovations around software operations, containers, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Nearly all Canonical technologies such as Juju, LXD, and Snaps, as well as the Canonical distribution of Kubernetes, can be used and deployed in production with your Amazon EC2 credentials today.  What’s more, these technologies are supported with professional SLAs from Canonical.

We are also actively innovating around containers with our machine container solution LXD,  which provides the density and efficiency of containers with the manageability and security of virtual machines. We are also partnering with Docker on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and others around process container orchestration. All of this and much more can be deployed through Juju, our open source service modeling platform for operating complex, interlinked, dynamic software stacks known as Big Software.

Snaps are a new packaging format used to securely package software as an app, making updates and rollbacks a breeze. Canonical’s Ubuntu Core is an open source, Snap-enabled production operating system that powers virtually anything, including robots, drones, industrial IoT gateways, network equipment, digital signage, mobile base stations, and fridges.

At re:Invent 2016, we will be talking to Ubuntu users about all these innovations and more. Come visit us at booth 2341 in Hall D.

The following is a guest post from David Aiken, Partner Solutions Architect (SA) for AWS Marketplace

The AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscription feature allows customers to find, subscribe and pay for the usage of your SaaS solution through AWS. In this post I’ll give you a quick overview describing the concepts, integration points and how to get started. You can find out more information by registering as a seller with AWS Marketplace and accessing the Seller Portal here.

The metering for the AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscription service is consumption based, meaning you would charge users for things they had done or used at an hourly rate. For example, if your SaaS service managed websites, you would set a price per website. Each hour you would report how many websites were being managed by your service. AWS would do the math and add the total to the customer’s bill for that hour.

When using the AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscription service, you need to determine the type of usage you are going to charge for. The top-level usage type is known as a “category” and can be either Hosts, Users, Data, Bandwidth, Requests or Tiers. You may select only 1 category. Within a category, you can define between 1 and 8 dimensions. Dimensions allow you to distinguish between different usage within a category, for example if the category is users, you could have a dimension for Admin users and charge $0.87/user/hour and another for Standard users charged at $0.22/user/hour.

Integrating with the SaaS Subscription Service

Once you have your category, dimensions and costs figured out, you need to integrate SaaS Subscriptions into your SaaS service. There are three integration tasks to complete:

Customer registration – When a customer subscribes to your service from AWS Marketplace, they will be redirected via an HTTP POST to your registration page. In the POST request will be a form field named x-amzn-marketplace-token. This token can be redeemed via an AWS API call to ResolveCustomer to determine the customer ID of the subscriber and the product code of the service they subscribed too. You should save this alongside any registration information as you will need it when reporting metering usage.

Report usage information – Each hour, you need to report usage information for each customer. You do this via an API call to BatchMeterUsage, sending up to 25 metering records at a time. You would send 1 record per customer per dimension. Each call would include the Customer ID, Dimension Name, Usage Quantity and UTC timestamp.

Handle Subscription events – When a customer subscribes or unsubscribes from your service, messages are sent to an SNS topic created by AWS for your service. It’s a good practice to subscribe an SQS queue to the topic, then read the messages from the queue. This way you won’t lose messages if your service is unavailable. The most important event to handle is the unsubscribe-pending. If you receive this for a customer, you will have 1 hour to report any final usage. After an hour you will receive an unsubscribe-success message, at which time no more metering records can be sent for that customer.

Figure 1: SaaS Subscriptions Integration Points

Getting Started

Before you can start development work, you will need a product to be created in AWS Marketplace. To do this, you will need to use Self-Service Listings, located within the “Listings” tab of the AWS Marketplace Management Portal (AMMP). If you are not already registered for access to AMMP, you must first sign up to access the portal.  To create a new SaaS Subscriptions product, log in to AMMP, navigate to the “Listings” tab, look for the “Create a New Product” box, and choose “SaaS Subscriptions” from the dropdown. You will then be guided through a set of web forms that will help you create your listing.

Once you have completed, reviewed, and submitted the form, the AWS Marketplace operations team will create a product listing for your service and send you the product code, along with the SNS topic. When your product is ready to review, your listing will show up with a status of “Approval Required” under the “Requests” area of Self-Service Listings. You can then click on your request to view your product code, pricing information, limited preview listing, and more. This product will remain hidden in limited preview until you have completed your development work and are ready to go public.

Seller vs Production Accounts

To list a product or SaaS service in AWS Marketplace, you need to register an AWS account to be your seller account. You can only have a single seller account, so you should consider creating a new account just for this purpose.

Calls to the AWS APIs need to be authenticated from the seller account. Rather than hosting your production code in the seller account, or embedding secret/access keys in your production code, you should consider using cross-account AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles. Cross-account IAM roles will allow you to have production code in different accounts than your seller account. This is very useful when you want to maintain a security boundary, or have multiple products to list.

Testing

When building out your integration, you will need to have several AWS accounts available that you can use as test customers. Since the product listing page is hidden during your development, you will need to instruct the AWS Marketplace operations team to authorize specific AWS accounts to view your product. When you create your product in Self-Service Listings, you can identify any additional AWS accounts to authorize by entering them in the “Accounts to Whitelist” field located on the “Pricing” tab. Once an AWS account is authorized, you can use that account to subscribe to your product and perform any testing.

You may also wish to have a test product set up so you can test the subscription workflow, metering and event handling in a different environment than your production code. To create a test product, simply create and submit another SaaS product using Self-Service Listings, making sure to indicate in the title of your product that it is the test version.

Summary

Integrating with SaaS Subscriptions requires you to be registered as a seller in AWS Marketplace and have a SaaS product created. There are three integrations to complete: customer registration, reporting customer usage, and handling subscription events. For more information, please visit the AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscriptions page.

Do you sell a software as a service (SaaS) or application programming interface (API) solution running on AWS?

If so, you can now offer your solution directly to AWS customers with a new feature from AWS Marketplace, SaaS Subscriptions. SaaS is one of the fastest growing software delivery mechanisms. With SaaS Subscriptions, AWS Marketplace makes it easy for your customers to quickly create an account while reusing their existing AWS billing relationship.

As a recent Forrester Consulting study commissioned by AWS showed, sellers have chosen SaaS solutions because it lets them be more agile, reach new customers, and lower the cost of application development.[1] Now, for the first time, sellers can take advantage of the full suite of AWS Marketplace features, including customer acquisition, unified billing, and reporting. This feature is available to any SaaS or API seller who runs their application on AWS and follows AWS security best practices. Members of the AWS Partner Network (APN) in the Advanced tier will automatically be eligible to list their products, but any software vendor can request to become a seller.

What does this mean for customers?

SaaS Subscriptions give your customers simpler procurement through AWS Marketplace. After clicking “Subscribe”, buyers are taken directly to your product’s registration page. Buyers then register using your existing registration flow and can quickly begin using your product without the friction of creating a new payment relationship. As the buyer uses your product, you provide us with metering records reflecting that usage and the SaaS usage charges will appear on a unified bill from AWS Marketplace, alongside any other services they buy directly from AWS.

What does this mean for APN Partners who want to sell their solutions as SaaS on AWS Marketplace?

As a SaaS seller, you get increased visibility to help reach over 1 million AWS customers, including over 100,000 active customers who have chosen AWS Marketplace due to the ease of finding, purchasing and deploying solutions. Customers can quickly review your end-user licensing agreement, subscribe through AWS Marketplace, and receive a single bill for all their software purchases through AWS Marketplace.

How do I get started?

We’ve made it as easy as possible for you to deliver your solution as a SaaS offering. Once you have established your AWS Marketplace Seller account, you’ll need to select a single billing dimension. You can choose from the existing options (users, hosts, data, units, tiers, or bandwidth) or request an additional dimension.  You can also define multiple price points (called variants) within this dimension (for example, admin, power, and read-only users within the user category). To get started with your listing, log into the AWS Marketplace Management Portal and navigate to the “Listings” tab.  To create a new SaaS listing, choose “SaaS Subscriptions” from the dropdown box under “Create a New Product.” Define your category, variants, pricing, and other listing data and submit it to AWS Marketplace once you are ready. You will receive a limited, preview version of your listing to test against before the listing is published live to the AWS Marketplace website.

Next, you’ll need to write code to modify your SaaS application to receive a token with your customer identifier and product code during registration. You’ll also have to modify your application to send hourly metering records that capture your customer’s usage. You can download the AWS software development kit (SDK) that will help you format your metering records in any of the AWS supported languages. You can find more information about the steps necessary to modify your application in the AWS Marketplace SaaS Seller Integration guide, or reach out to your AWS Category Manager to connect with a solutions architect to help you with the process.

How do I learn more?

To learn more about selling your product as a SaaS solution, or how to modify your product to become a SaaS solution, be sure to visit https://thinkwithwp.com/marketplace/saas/.

Read Forrester’s Total Economic Impact Analysis, “The ISV Business Case For Building SaaS on Amazon Web Services”, an August 2016 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of AWS

[1] The ISV Business Case for Building SaaS on Amazon Web Services (AWS), an August 2016 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Amazon Web Services

The following is a guest post from our AWS Marketplace team.

Timely, high-quality software support is a critical part of business-to-business and business-to-consumer software sales. To help ensure that software vendors on AWS Marketplace have the tools to easily support their end customers, AWS Marketplace today released AWS Marketplace Product Support Connection (PSC), a new program that gives vendors more visibility into the end customer in order to more easily provide product support. Using PSC, customers can choose to share information such as name, organization, and email address with software vendors through the AWS Marketplace website.

Customers can share their contact data directly in the AWS Marketplace web site during or after the subscription process, without needing to go to a separate web site to register for support.  AWS Marketplace then shares the provided data, along with details such as product code and subscription information, with software vendors via an API. The data that customers share through the program lets vendors keep customer contact information up to date in their support systems, enabling vendors to quickly verify and access customers’ identities upon receiving a support request.

If you are an AWS Marketplace software vendor and would like to enroll your products in PSC, you will need to integrate with the API, provide a writeup of the support processes you plan to follow under PSC, and ensure that you meet a few program requirements. To get started, please log in to the AWS Marketplace Management Portal to learn more.

AWS Marketplace is launching this new feature with nine vendors who provided feedback on the program design and integrated early. We’d like to thank Barracuda, Chef, Matillion, Rogue Wave, SoftNAS, Sophos, zData, Zend, and Zoomdata for their commitment to providing high-quality product support.

AWS Marketplace offers more than 2,700 software listings from more than 925 independent software vendors. If you are a U.S.- or E.U.-based software vendor and would like to list your product for sale on AWS Marketplace, please visit our Sell on AWS Marketplace page to get started.

The following is a guest post from Suney Sharma, a Partner Solutions Architect at AWS. 

Are you planning to launch an AWS Marketplace offering for your product?

If you are an independent software vendor (ISV), the AWS Marketplace offers you an opportunity to capitalize on the widespread migration to cloud computing, simplify and shorten your sales cycle, and grow your business. Many APN Partners sell their solutions on AWS Marketplace, as it is a great channel with which to reach customers who are running their workloads on AWS. In this post, we walk through an overview of AWS Marketplace, followed by some key considerations and best practices as you get ready to list your product in AWS Marketplace. We focus on bundling your product as an AMI (Amazon Machine Image). We also offer tips for applications that have a complex multi-node architecture.

What is AWS Marketplace?

AWS Marketplace is an online store where customers can find, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS. As with AWS services, customers pay only for what they use. AWS Marketplace helps enable you, as an ISV, to reduce the cost of customer acquisition and deliver your solution on a global scale. To date, AWS Marketplace has over 2,700 listed offerings from more than 925 software vendors. AWS customers use 205 million hours a month of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) resources for AWS Marketplace products. These numbers are a strong statement of the value of AWS Marketplace for both customers and partners.

AWS customers subscribe to products in AWS Marketplace based on their business needs. They can then launch the software in their AWS accounts. AWS meters and charges customers based on usage, and the usage charges are reflected in the monthly AWS bill. This method of software delivery enables customers to link software costs to actual usage instead of being bound by a fixed cost license.

AWS Marketplace also takes into account that different products might have different metrics for metering usage. For instance, some products may need to be billed by the number of provisioned users while others might be billed by amount of data transfer. To support additional billing options, AWS Marketplace now supports multiple dimensions for usage metering: Users, Hosts, Bandwidth, and Data.  For example, by using the AWS Marketplace Metering Service, a seller can charge a customer every hour based on the number of provisioned users or the amount of data transferred. Find out more about the AWS Marketplace Metering Service.

How Products are Listed in AWS Marketplace

Sellers can bundle their product in an AMI, which is listed in AWS Marketplace. Customers use these AMIs to launch Amazon EC2 instances in their AWS account. AWS charges customers based on their usage of the product. See the AWS Marketplace Seller Guide for more details.

Along with the AMI, the seller provides product metadata in a form called the Product Load Form. The form captures a lot of information about the product, including:

• Types of instances that the customer can select.
• Product charges applicable to each instance (in addition to Amazon EC2 charges).
• AWS regions in which the product will be available.
• Additional information such as product description, links to support information, and the seller’s end user license agreement (EULA).

The AWS Marketplace team uses this information to provide a product description on the AWS Marketplace website. Customers who wish to purchase the product do so by subscribing to the AMI and accepting the seller’s EULA.

The customer is then taken to the launch page within the AWS Marketplace website. The AMI is used to launch Amazon EC2 instances in the customer’s AWS account, and the necessary API calls from the software are provided on a minimal privilege basis. This means that the software will have limited privileges to the customer’s AWS account and to the resources provisioned within it.

Support for Clusters and AWS Resources

In the flow explained above, the customer runs the product on one or more Amazon EC2 instances. However, some products might have more complex needs; for example, they might need to:

• Run on a cluster of instances or meet HA requirements.
• Access AWS resources like Elastic Load Balancing or Auto Scaling groups.
• Need specific network and security configurations.

An example could be a product with a three-tier architecture (web, app, and database), which is deployed on different Amazon EC2 instances. Each tier may need to interact with different AWS services, which will need to be provisioned along with the instances. For example, Auto Scaling groups and Elastic Load Balancers may be required for the web and app layers, and the database layer may need access to an Amazon S3 bucket for backups.

For such products, AWS Marketplace provides support for clusters and AWS resources. When a customer subscribes to such a product in AWS Marketplace, all resources, including Amazon EC2 instances, required AWS services, and dependencies get installed and configured automatically.

Under the hood, this is a simple execution of an AWS CloudFormation template provided by the seller. When the customer chooses Subscribe on the AWS Marketplace page, the AWS CloudFormation console window is displayed and the seller-provided template is executed. It is important to remember that the template is executed in the customer’s AWS account and relies on AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and policies to provide access to AWS resources in the account. This is a powerful capability because customers can securely deploy sophisticated software in their accounts without having to understand the underlying setup complexity.

For these types of software, the seller provides the AWS Marketplace team with an AMI and the AWS CloudFormation templates required to set up and install the product. AWS CloudFormation manages the installation and setup.

Best Practices for Creating AMIs

AWS provides detailed documentation around creating generic AMIs in the Amazon EC2 user guides for Linux and Windows.

The best practices mentioned in these documents apply to AWS Marketplace AMIs. There are some additional considerations that we’d like to highlight.

Customer experience considerations:

• Your AMI dictates the customer experience; therefore, you should take appropriate care that it conforms to your customer experience requirements.
• Launching an AMI performs an unassisted installation of your software. Since a good customer experience is of paramount importance, we recommend that you have clear documentation around setup, usage, and best practices to assist the customer.

Security considerations:

• User accounts and passwords: For security of the customer, you should not hard-code passwords in cleartext in the AMI. As a best practice you can:
  • Generate a password at boot time or use passwords that are specific to the customer environment, such as instance IDs (see the Tips section).

OR

• Force the customer to change the password at first login.
• If any new vulnerability affecting your AMI is discovered, you will need to modify your AMI to ensure that the customer is not affected.
• In some cases you may have no control over the network and security group configurations for the Amazon EC2 instances the AMI is deployed on. In such cases it is a good idea to disable or uninstall unnecessary services and packages.

Development and Test considerations:

• Make sure you have a well-defined, repeatable strategy to build, update, and test your AMIs. (Note: No test or sandbox capabilities exist for AWS Marketplace.)
• Your AMI should provide the customer with an image that is secure and performant per requirements. This means that you may need to include these aspects in your testing.

For additional details, see the Security Guidance for AMI Developers.

Best Practices for Using AWS CloudFormation for AWS Marketplace

As mentioned earlier, in cases where a product needs to be deployed on multiple nodes and also interact with other AWS services like Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon S3, etc., the seller can provide AWS CloudFormation templates along with the AMI.

Some points to consider while planning this approach:

• Documentation: Clear documentation with snapshots of the setup screens will be of great value in unassisted installations. This could be in the form of setup guides, user guides, etc.

• Customer input: A multi-node deployment will need to capture some information from the customer such as security group configuration, network details, instance types, instance count, etc. The AWS CloudFormation templates provide parameters to capture customer input, and description fields that provide information about the required input. For example, you could use parameters to define the source IPs in a security group configuration and provide a description to assist the customer.

• Region of launch: Since the customer will have the choice of launching the application in different AWS Regions, you can use the Mappings section in the AWS CloudFormation template to point to the relevant AMI in the region.

• Outputs: The Outputs section of the template can be used to provide more information about the deployed stack. This can include things like IP addresses of the configured nodes.

• AWS Identity and Access Management Roles: In most cases, the Amazon EC2 instances may need to interact with other AWS services like Amazon S3, Amazon SNS, etc. Use of access/secret keys in the AMI is forbidden. As a security best practice, you should use AWS IAM roles. These roles should have the least privileges that are required for interacting with the service. The good news is that IAM roles can be created in the AWS CloudFormation template, in the Resources section. If you choose to create a role using this method, it will be a good idea to include details in the documentation.

• Successful completion: Your documentation should clearly articulate how the customer will know that the installation is complete. This could be something like a login page displayed on one of the IPs provided in the Outputs section. The documentation should also provide information on what the user should do if the installation fails. Remember that the customer is charged for the AWS resources even if your product is not correctly installed.

• If you create or edit security group rules, please ensure that SSH/RDP [port 22/443] is not open to 0.0.0.0/0 by default.

Additional Tips for Your AWS Marketplace Deployments

• For unique passwords to be generated at run time you can use the instance IDs of the created instances. The metadata service can be queried for instance IDs. Customers can then be required to change the password when they log in for the first time.

• AWS CloudFormation does not allow you to create a variable number of instances. If your product requires the customer to select the number of nodes, you could create an Auto Scaling group where the group size is captured as input in the Parameters section.

• If you need to create new security groups as a part of the deployment, request customer input for the CIDR block/IP address allowed to access the application and use the same for security group configuration.

• For complex configuration management tasks like editing files, configuring inter-node communication and complex deployment tasks, consider using AWS OpsWorks. AWS CloudFormation supports creation of AWS OpsWorks stacks, layers, and applications in the Resources section. The relevant recipes can be stored in a publicly readable Amazon S3 bucket.

Conclusion

In this post, we provided a high-level view of how to list products in AWS Marketplace. We also shared some important considerations when creating AMIs and AWS CloudFormation-based offerings. To conclude, remember that customer experience and security should be your top considerations when you evaluate different strategies to list your product in AWS Marketplace.

Are you an EU-Based ISV looking for additional channels to offer your software products to customers? If yes, then we’ve got great news for you.

Today, AWS Marketplace announced new functionality which supports the registration for ISVs based in the EU.

What Does This Mean for ISVs?

Previously, only ISVs with a U.S. subsidiary could sell on the AWS Marketplace. The launch of this new functionality opens up the service to start-ups and smaller ISVs based in Europe who no longer need to worry about having a US-based entity. You can now operate directly out of the EU.

What Does This Mean for Customers?

AWS Marketplace provides customers with an immediate route to software from the cloud, giving customers the traditional cloud advantages of short time to deployment, flexible pay-as-you-go pricing, and scalability without infrastructure management or hardware capex. Customers around the world will now have access to a much richer catalogue of products as more European products become available in AWS Marketplace. Fourteen new European sellers from security, networking, databases, business intelligence, storage and media have already made their products available in AWS Marketplace, adding to the more than 2,700 software listings from over 925 ISVs, such as Tableau (analytics), Sophos (security), SAP (HANA 1), Oracle (EnterpriseDB), and Microsoft (SQL Server, SharePoint).

To learn about the 14 new EU-based ISV products already available, click here.

Are you looking for an efficient way to sell your software to U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) customers on AWS?

Today, we announced the launch of AWS Marketplace for the U.S. IC, an isolated and distinct implementation of AWS Marketplace. There are a number of benefits to listing your products in the AWS Marketplace for the U.S. IC that Jeff Barr outlined on the AWS Blog, including:

• Greater access to a new market that may not have been visible or accessible to you before;
• A more efficient approach to selling to the U.S. Intelligence Community, without lengthy contract negotiations;
• The ability to take advantage of your existing knowledge of AWS, packaging tools, and processes you already have in place to prepare the release of your product for use in AWS Marketplace; and
• Assistance to create cleared support engineers. In order to support this community, your software will need to be accredited. This requires cleared support engineers. Through Amazon’s Innovation Center initiative, AWS is assisting those listing in the AWS Marketplace for the U.S. IC with the creation of two cleared support engineers.

AWS Marketplace for the U.S. Intelligence Community represents a great opportunity for you to reach this unique customer base, and we’d like to help you get started.

What Are the Publisher Requirements to Sell on AWS Marketplace for the U.S. Intelligence Community?

There are a few steps you need to take in order to become a seller on AWS Marketplace for the U.S. Intelligence Community.

•  Your products must be available in the commercial AWS Marketplace.
•  You must submit a separate U.S. Intelligence Foreign Ownership Control and Influence (FOCI) adjudication package.
•  Ensure that your products work in the Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) space; this means that your products do not make any calls to the public Internet and do not attempt to access any external resources.

Want to Learn More?

If you are interested in listing your product on AWS Marketplace for the U.S. IC and want to request additional information, please contact icmp@amazon.com.

Head over to the AWS Public Sector blog for more information on the announcement.

Brad Lyman is a Sr. Product Manager – Technical Products at AWS Marketplace

Earlier this year, AWS Marketplace announced the availability of AWS Marketplace Metering Service (MMS), which supports new pricing dimensions such as users, hosts, and data. After a seller integrates their product with AWS Marketplace Metering Service, that product will emit an hourly record capturing the usage of any single pricing dimension. The AWS Marketplace team is pleased to announce that these products are now available in the EU (Ireland) Region. Customers can now easily subscribe to software priced by users, hosts, or data, deploy into a data center in the EU, and only pay for what they use.

What does this mean for APN Partners who sell, or want to sell, on AWS Marketplace?

This release increases the number of customers you can reach with AWS Marketplace Metering Service. Sellers on AWS Marketplace can now make their products available to customers who use the EU (Ireland) Region for data sovereignty, latency reduction, or multi-region redundancy.

How do I get started?

If you already use AWS Marketplace to sell a product using the AWS Marketplace Metering Service, you can contact the AWS Marketplace Seller Ops team to make your product available in the EU (Ireland) Region. To register a new product to use the new AWS Marketplace Metering Service, take the following steps:

• If you’re a new seller on AWS Marketplace, register by visiting AWS Marketplace, or go directly to: https://thinkwithwp.com/marketplace/management/register/.
• Next, you will have to register your product for a new type of usage dimension. On the form, indicate the dimension you want to meter.
• Next, you’ll be able to acquire the specific productCode and usageDimension. When you register your product, you can download a SDK to help you format your metering records. You will have the option of downloading a SDK for any of the languages the AWS SDK supports.

To learn more about selling software on any of the new consumption dimensions, including the steps to modify your product to use the AWS Marketplace Metering Service, visit the AWS Marketplace Seller Portal.

Last Friday, the AWS ASEAN partner team hosted the AWS Partner Summit – Singapore. The event was intended to provide partners with valuable insight into key trends on AWS, and to help partners to connect with both one another and with AWS team members. I was fortunate enough to be a part of the event, and had a great opportunity to connect with a number of consulting and technology partners from across the region. Similar to the Partner Summit – Sydney, the event featured guest speakers from AWS, APN member firms, and AWS customer firms.

Partner Keynote

Cam McNaught, Head of ASEAN Channels & Alliances kicked off the event. He was joined by Terry Wise, WW VP of Channels & Alliances, AWS, who spoke to partners about what we’ve seen to be some keys to partner success on AWS, which include:

• Build solutions to map to Competencies
• Become AWS Trained & Certified
• Bring solutions to AWS Marketplace
• Engage with field sellers
• Collaborate with other APN Partners 

Terry also discussed key trends representing a large opportunity for Partners on AWS, and Premier Consulting Partner BlazeClan took the stage to discuss a successful cloud migration the company completed for a large company in region.

Sessions

Three sessions were hosted across different topics:

• Succeeding with AWS by Delivering High Value Services, presented by Darren Thayre, AWS Professional Services
• Building a Big Data and Analytics Practice – Partner Opportunities with AWS, presented by Craig Stires, Head of Big Data and Analytics, APAC
• Beyond the Fridge: Every Thing Will Be Connected, presented by Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com

The sessions featured guest speakers from Seaco and Trax. One of my favorite quotes came from ‘Succeeding with AWS by Delivering High Value Services’, when Brandon O’Neill, Director of IT Services, Seaco, explained what the company was looking for in a partner: “We were looking for a mentor to help guide us onto the cloud”.

AWS Partner Recognition

The ASEAN team chose to recognize three APN Partners in three different categories: AWS Rising Star Partner, AWS Innovation Partner, and AWS Partner of the Year ASEAN 2015. Congratulations to the following APN Partners!

• AWS Rising Star Partner – Cloud Comrade Pte Ltd
• AWS Innovation Partner – Fusionex
• AWS Partner of the Year ASEAN 2015 – BlazeClan

Networking

I loved one of the main approaches the team took to bring partners together. Throughout the event, folks had the opportunity to grab coffee…but they couldn’t grab just a single coffee. Coffees were paired together, and partners were meant to grab two coffees and then ‘partner up’, share the coffees, and strike up a conversation. The team also set up networking booths in the main hall for partners to learn more about key AWS services and programs, including AWS Partner Marketing and AWS Training & Certification.

More Information

Did you miss the Partner Summit? We live tweeted the day from @AWS_Partners – follow us and re-visit the event minute-by-minute!

That’s a wrap on the 2016 AWS Partner Summit – Sydney! The ANZ Partner team organized a great event for APN Partners, and I was thrilled to get to be a part of it. The event featured guest speakers from AWS, APN member firms, and AWS customer firms. What follows is a short recap of the day:

AWS Partner Keynote

The event kicked off with a keynote hosted by Stefan Jansen, Head of ANZ Channels and Alliances, AWS, and Terry Wise, WW VP of Channels & Alliances, AWS. Both Stefan and Terry spoke to the importance of putting the customer first, and working together to drive customer success. Terry then discussed what we find to be some of the keys to partner success, along with seven key trends that represent an enormous opportunity for partners on AWS:

1. Cloud Migrations
2. Cloud Managed Services
3. DevOps
4. Big Data 
5. Internet of Things (IoT)
6. AWS for Windows
7. Embrace New Software Delivery Models 

The keynote featured guest speakers from firms OFX, Datacom, and Versent.

Also highlighted in the keynote was the investment AWS is making in the APN, Consulting and Technology Partner collaboration, and the 2016 APN Cloud Warriors for Australia & New Zealand. APN Cloud Warriors are AWS Certified individuals who are both deeply skilled on the AWS platform, and are strong technology advocates. Congratulations to all recognized!

Breakout Sessions

Nine breakout sessions were held across a wide range of topics, and featured a number of guest speakers:

• Building a Thriving Consulting Services Business with AWS
• Realising the Benefits of Cloud: Cloud Migration & Cloud Adoption Framework
• Expanding your Cloud Business with AWS Marketplace
• Helping Large Organisations Transform Their Business Using AWS 
• Monetising the AWS Cloud: Leveraging APN Programs, Training, and Support
• Selling with AWS – Understanding how to leverage the AWS Sales Methodology and Partner Best Practices
• Microsoft Workloads on AWS: Best Practices and Patterns for Architecture, Migrations, and Licensing
• Partner Managed Services on AWS 
• Building a Big Data Practice on AWS

AWS Partner Recognition

The ANZ team chose to recognize four APN Partners in four different categories: AWS Rising Star Partner, Most Innovative AWS Partner, Consulting Partner of the Year, and Technology Partner of the Year. Congratulations to the following APN Partners!

• AWS Rising Star Partner – API Talent
• Most Innovative AWS Partner – Comunet Pty Ltd
• Consulting Partner of the Year – DiUS Computing
• Technology Partner of the Year – TechnologyOne

Networking

AWS Partner Summits are a fantastic place for APN Partners to meet both AWS team members, and other APN Partners who may offer services and/or solutions on AWS that complement their existing offerings. Needless to say, there was no shortage of networking at the end of the AWS Partner Summit in Sydney. Did you have the opportunity to connect with other partners while at the AWS Partner Summit – Sydney? Tell us about it in the comments section.

More Information

Did you miss the event? We live tweeted the day from @AWS_Partners – follow us and take a look back at all of the action!