- Hello, everybody.
Welcome to Ten Minute Tutorial for Research.
Today we'll talk about
selling your quantum solutions on AWS Marketplace.
My name is Nihit Pokhrel.
I'm a partner solutions architect
in the High Performance Computing team.
And I'm joined today by Joseph Shih,
who's a partner solutions architect in AWS Marketplace team.
In the next 10 minutes, Joseph will do a quick presentation
about AWS Marketplace, and then I'll follow up
with some frequently asked questions.
Joseph over to you.
- Thank you Nihit.
So AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalog
for third party software where you can find by
deploy and manage third party software, data products,
as well as services to build your businesses on.
So we're gonna talk about how you as a seller of
quantum algorithms can sell your products
on Marketplace, and Marketplace has different product types
and those kind of dictate
how you would package your product.
So in general, the product types that we have
there are two main categories.
And the first is that the products
and software that deploy directly
into the buyers AWS account.
So these are software that run
in the buyers' account without the seller's involvement.
And the first group we have are single AMIs.
And AMIs are Amazon Machine Images.
They are your virtual machines that can be deployed
onto EC2 instances in the AWS account.
And EC2, Elastic Compute, are services
that can run virtual machines.
We also have container product types in Marketplace.
And docker container images that can deploy
in the buyer's AWS account.
There is also SageMaker resources, such as model package
and algorithms that can also be deployed
into the buyer's account.
Then you have product types that are hosted
and maintained by the sellers.
And these include the SaaS, where the buyers
will directly consume the product in the seller's account
without having to deploy any infrastructure
in the buyer's account.
There's also the API data sets for AWS Data Exchange.
AWS Data Exchange is a feature in the AWS Marketplace
where data providers can sell their data in various ways.
And one of them is via an API that they would host.
So today we're gonna focus mostly on the AMIs,
containers, SaaS, and the API data sets.
How to package an AMI, the Amazon Machine Images,
is you have your instance, your VM that's running,
and you create an image based off that.
That image is then given to Marketplace,
and when buyers go and subscribe to it
they're given access to take that image
and deploy it onto an EC2 instance
to run that virtual machine.
There's also single AMI with cloud formation.
And cloud formation is a way to describe
and deploy services in AWS.
So you may have AWS services such as a relational database.
You might have some storage services that you're using
that your software depends on.
So any of those can be bundled into the product.
So you would provide us a template
and those are then made available
to the buyers to deploy the AMI,
along with those additional services
to provide that one click experience.
There's also multi AMI
and the only difference here is that
you have multiple different instances
and you wanna publish multiple different images
into the Marketplace.
And those also are accompanied
by a template that can help deploy those instances
and other AWS services that the software needs.
Moving on to containers, packaging containers.
In AWS Marketplace, the containers
that are published are published into
a repository that's hosted by AWS Marketplace.
So when you go into your packaging motion,
you would push container images that buyers would need
into this repository managed by AWS Marketplace.
And your buyers who have subscribed would have
the ability to pull those images.
And to help them deploy it on the various
container orchestration platforms
available to them in their account.
You as a seller can provide them with deployment templates.
So those can be helm charts,
those can be usage instructions,
those can be cloud formation templates,
anything that'll help them deploy that onto clusters
that they're gonna run your containers on.
Your software will also need to integrate
with AWS Marketplace APIs
for some billing integration there.
For SaaS, when the buyer comes to AWS Marketplace
they agree to purchase upfront your SaaS contracts
or agree to your priceless
when they sign up for your SaaS product.
So SaaS products are hosted in your seller account.
So this is not something that they would deploy
into their buyer account.
There isn't really any infrastructure for them to deploy.
Everything is done through you.
So in that case the buyer,
after subscribing, would then be redirected
to your landing page, your SaaS application.
Your SaaS application would then need to capture
a token that they can call the APIs with
to find out who the customer ID is, who the customer is,
and the customer ID,
and the product that they have purchased.
With that information,
you can call another API to understand
what did the buyer purchase up front?
And how many units of that that they purchase.
Furthermore, with that same customer information,
you can then report additional usage
that is outside of the contracts,
or if it's a subscription product
where it's all purely pay as you go,
then you would report those usage
to AWS Marketplace so that Marketplace can then
charge the customer on their bill.
There's also a SNS topic,
which is a simple notification service
that you can subscribe to,
to keep up to date of any changes to their subscription
or the contracts they have purchased.
And furthermore, once any changes happen
you can call our APIs again
to understand what they have upgraded to
or any changes in that case.
There are API data sets for AWS Data Exchange.
So AWS Data Exchange allows data providers
to provide data in various ways.
One of which is an S3 bucket for example.
Where if I have a bunch of CSV files,
then I can put them into a S3 bucket
and publish that through AWS Data Exchange.
And the buyers would then pull those data files out.
Now, what if I as a seller want to publish
more of the dynamic data?
As a seller, you can then publish an API instead.
So this is very similar to the SaaS way
except with the API data set,
you don't really need to manage the identity there.
It really isn't a token for you to capture
to understand who the customer is.
What you essentially need,
it was just an Amazon API gateway
that will be in front of your application.
And to have responses, to receive requests,
and respond in certain ways that the Data Exchange expects.
And what's behind the API gateway is,
anything you would like to use.
So that could be Lambda functions,
that connect to other services and DynamoDB.
So this is very similar to how SaaS is done, except
that you don't have to manage about each individual user.
You will get some identifiers that come
through the API gateway, but then the idea is
that you're just providing that service.
So everything's proxy through API gateway
and you don't have to worry about identity in this case.
And that brings us to the close
of our different product types.
- Thank you, Joseph.
Now, I have a couple of questions that customers
and partners have asked me before.
We will paste the links to some of these question...
Answers to some of these questions.
So please do not worry about writing everything down.
The very first question,
can I offer free trials for my software offering?
- Yeah, that's a good question.
Depending on the product type,
there are some free trial features.
For example the AMI product type,
you can set up a free trial where the buyer
is not charged your software fee for X amount of days
and they can run one instance, for example.
In other product types,
there's different ways to do free trials,
and some product types don't support free trials.
So it really depends on that product type.
- Okay, thank you.
And what about billing?
Will AWS bill my customers directly?
- Yes. So AWS Marketplace's expectation
is the buyer will pay AWS Marketplace.
And AWS Marketplace will then provide the software
that's deployed into the buyer's account.
If it's a SaaS, then the buyer will then go
to your SaaS to consume the product.
But AWS Marketplace will handle the billing
and allow buyers to then pay with one AWS bill.
So that's also a benefit for buyers.
- Okay. Thank you.
Now, a couple more questions and these are quantum specific.
So where will my solution be listed?
Is there a designated page where quantum computing
solutions will be listed on Marketplace?
- There isn't a quantum computing category page
or list of products in Marketplace today.
However, I believe it's going to go under
high performance computing at the the moment.
And in the future, that may change.
- Okay. Thank you.
Knowing that quantum is a very new field,
it's an emerging technology.
And every engagement involves some kind of
professional service and consulting services.
So in this case, can I list my quantum focus
professional services on Marketplace?
- Yes, you can.
The only requirement is that
you have some software product on AWS Marketplace
and then you can publish a professional service
listing on Marketplace and then charge
for professional services on top of your software solution.
- Okay. All right. Thank you.
One more question.
Say if I wanted IP protection guaranteed
from AWS Marketplace, what method should I pick?
- Yeah, that's a very interesting question.
So IP protection is one of
importance to the sellers often that we speak with.
So looking at different product types
we have on the screen here.
The single AMI's, the containers,
the SaaS, and the API data sets.
So with AMI product types,
the buyer has full access to your virtual machine image.
So that means that they can look inside and be...
Look inside your volumes,
they can inspect your volumes.
Similar with the container images,
they can inspect the layers.
In fact, the container images are your
run of the mill docker containers.
They can be downloaded,
and pulled to a desktop and inspected there.
So with the software that's deployed in the buyer's account
namely the AMI and containers, there's no really way
a way to protect your IP there, your intellectual property.
With the products like SaaS and API data sets,
those are where you can protect your intellectual property
because those run inside your seller account
and you expose what you want to expose
to the buyer and when they consume your product.
- Okay, thank you.
So with all this information,
as a seller where do I get started?
- Yeah. So if you go to the AWS Marketplace,
you can click sell on AWS Marketplace,
this is the link at the top right,
and log into an AWS account.
So the only thing you really need
to get a seller account
is to sign up for an AWS account
and agree to some terms and services.
If you wanna sell paid products
there are some additional steps such as
your tax entity and bank accounts.
There's gonna be a link in the descriptions
that'll explain the requirements
for setting up a seller account.
So look out for that.
- All right. Thank you.
That's all we had Joseph.
Thank you for joining us
and answering questions about AWS Marketplace.
- Absolutely. Thank you Nihit.