Isn't this what Partner ID is designed for?
"Injects" is a strong word.
Maybe "Hashicorp provides an Azure Partner ID in Terraform deployments for deployment stats, and some users may not want that" would be a better title.
"Injects" is a strong word.
Maybe "Hashicorp provides an Azure Partner ID in Terraform deployments for deployment stats, and some users may not want that" would be a better title.
They very clearly allow it to be changed in a config; and I'm willing to bet my socks that Azure is not giving Hashicorp 'deployment structure' information based on a partner id.
From Microsoft documentation:
This program will allow ISVs who deploy their software on an Azure customer’s infrastructure an opportunity to get credit for the impact of their software.
The data generated by the Azure ISV Customer Usage Attribution program will be used for ISV partners to qualify for partner programs by providing a automated method of linking a customers usage to the ISVs software.
ISV partners will receive reporting for deployments from the Azure ISV Customer Usage Attribution program. Data may be anonymized for deployments from outside of Azure Marketplace. Reporting will be made available in the Cloud Publisher Portal, the same platform where GUIDs will be registered and partners can configure and manage listings for Azure Marketplace.
Nothing in the deployment itself is sent to them (and no cloud would ever risk that kind of exposure). It's simple usage analytics.
Hashicorp is facilitating the purchase of Azure products, and deserves a cut of the revenue. But this should be handled on the account level, either on sign-up or as an account field (a-la Amazon Smile)
I'm less okay with the tracking for analytics purposes, but if Terraform finds some way to make it easy for me to tell cloud providers who sent me, that seems fair.
Or in other words, the "cut of the revenue" needs to be in proportion to the usage of Azure resources generated by the partner tool. I think that's why its designed this way.
1) How does the cloud provider know what the ISV is selling, in order to credit them for it (discounts, incentives, program membership, etc)?
2) How do the sales reps get paid on related deals? This goes both ways: the ISV's reps get paid regardless but they need a way to tag the cloud-based deal in their own CRM, and the cloud sales reps need to be able to get paid base on the ISV partner's cloud deals, and that's really hard unless there is a concrete way to relate the ISV's sales deal to cloud consumption associated with the end customer.
One of the ways to do this is on the front end via deployment tracking (like this Terraform ID). Another way is to do it on the back end through billing account linkages. In any case, the end customer shouldn't really care one way or another -- these are just mechanisms to ensure the partner relationship between ISV and hyperscaler is well understood.