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AWS Marketplace

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201 pointspsychotik96 comments

This is close to what we'd want to replace the business model of a bunch of sketchy startups.

Startups with nice "todo"/personal data apps, etc. (cases where it's silly for the user to put their data in strangers' hands for no apparent reason) could "sell" them to users. If the startup disapeared, the user could still pay for web-app hosting.

The problem with using this particular AWS offering for that purpose is that every app would cost you hourly to run and would vastly underuse the computing resources that the user is paying for. It would be great if there were a similar offering based on a programming model where many apps could be provided by a single instance, or even perform on-demand provisioning.

I think this is the future! Somebody make it happen.

pageforest.com? (my project). But ... no payments system built in. I found that the JavaScript clientside-only programming model was hard to get developers to adopt.

Looks promising, particularly for the Todo-list type webapps which I suspect could be implemented to run entirely on the client. Are there any apps in particular that you'd recommend I look at to see what your platform can do?

I think a full solution will allow people to implement server-side functionality as well. Perhaps that's in your plans? Also, I think the ability to sell access to apps would help attract developers to your platform.

Very cool! Need to promote it a bit more with some usable, helpful demos maybe?

Hosting your software on a secure cloud server and licensing it out solves the problem of piracy, doesn't it?

That's cool. However, people must still understand the software they are using. For instance, someone is selling Nginx 0.8. The latest version is 1.0.15.

Agreed. I saw "turnkey rails" in the sidebar and thought I'd take a look into it. It's very unclear what versions of software are included. The last changelog entry on 2011/12/06 says nothing about ruby or rails versions. The last mention was 2011/01/27 claiming REE 1.8.7-2010.02_i386_ubuntu10.04.

To give a perspective on update frequency, according to the same page (http://www.turnkeylinux.org/updates/rails), two updates before that was Fri, 2009/10/23 - 16:35. This update claims to have ruby 4.1 installed. It seems that their VM image also includes a time machine.

Not getting a huge feel of confidence from that being featured on their landing page. An open market can be good, but when it comes to supplying an image for my production env, that type of thing could leave me feeling a bit uneasy.

It's a shame, because this is how we get massive security scares that affect the whole industry. One person couldn't be bothered to upgrade Apache and the whole industry is insecure.

Nginx 0.8 with support. Sure, 1.0.15 would be better, but enterprises generally care more about support than about having the latest version (see Red Hat).

Yes, but there are several major security advisories since 0.8. Any support worth their pay would be using the latest version.

Version numbers aren't that relevant for Red Hat's packages, because we backport security fixes (and features) into the older versions. And yes, customers prefer it that way.

Ok, I don't really have a problem with how Red Hat do things. However, if I was employing a sysadmin to administrate my servers, I want the latest production software please.

I have to ask .. why?

If you're worried about security updates, Red Hat monitors dozens of channels and backports all security fixes to all supported software, so that's not a problem.

If you're worried about features, Red Hat selectively backports features at customer request, or gives the customers free updates to the new RHEL.

Our customers want to install a particular release of RHEL and have it work and supported for 10 years. They actively don't want random version upgrades (which often remove as many things as they add, as well as causing exciting new bugs).

Through the vulnerability scanning I do at work, our tool marks a lot of things just based on version numbers. Looking into them deeper, I see the backported patch has been applied. RHEL does a pretty good job on this, really stands out. Makes my vulnerability scanning a little more time consuming, but frees up time I would otherwise be spending on documenting security breeches and data loss.

Kudos.

Too bad it's currently US only if you want to sell something :(

"AWS Marketplace currently only supports Sellers with a US Subsidiary that can submit a W-9 tax form. "

> "AWS Marketplace currently only supports Sellers with a US Subsidiary that can submit a W-9 tax form. "

Sounds like you can blame the government here, not Amazon.

How does Apple manage to pay iOS developers from all the rest of the countries?

Subsidiaries in those countries, most likely.

American companies can perfectly well pay foreigners, in which case the foreign entity provides a W8BEN form.

The fact that the red tape is not insurmountable doesn't mean that it's trivial.

We're not talking about a bootstrapped startup though; this is Amazon with all the legal expertise that means. They managed to evade £9 million in UK tax!

Just because Amazon is big doesn't mean that everything they do has to be big and full-featured right from the beginning. That's how big companies ossify.

I guess one could always find a justification. But the fact of the matter is that no other big US company managed to do what Apple did years ago: give money to non-US companies/individuals selling IP.

Google's AppStore still supports only a limited number of countries.

Amazon don't support sellers outside the US for any of their offerings (be it, selling books via Kindle Direct Publishing or selling apps in their Android store or selling EC2 images).

This is not a feature that's too early to talk about because AWS Marketplace is new. Supporting non-US sellers is something that Amazon just doesn't seem to be able to do it or doesn't care.

Frankly I don't know if it's a matter of red-tape (they would need a single EU presence, for example, to cater to the 27 member states) or just some kind of weird protectionism.

Why? Other marketplaces (Google Apps, for example) seem to support international sellers well.

could somebody explain why Amazon has the US only issue, while apple appstore goes worldwide almost from day one?

I worked at Amazon for several years; one of my team's biggest projects during all those years was expanding certain partner programs to new international locales.

I think Amazon generally prefers to launch quickly in one or two big locales, then expand geographically over time. The alternative is to delay the launch everywhere until support for every region is ready. Launching everywhere at once has its benefits (in particular it can make for better publicity), but potentially at the cost of being later to market and the opportunity cost of revenue not earned during the delay. Amazon has less focus on major PR events than Apple, so it probably weighs these costs and benefits differently.

Er, did the app store actually do that? I thought there were still countries with no app store.

I wonder if companies like mine could proxy/resell for you, since we have a US subsidiary in Boston that meet the criteria. We're working on rolling out our own issue management product into the AWS Marketplace and having a local US office was a lifesaver for us, for this and other distribution and billing bureaucracies (related to consulting in this case).

I wish Google had a better version for AppEngine. One click provisioning and integration with Apps domains for authentication and user info with a SaaS style payment processing built in.

They have a Google Apps Marketplace: https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/

Google Apps Marketplace is for Google Apps -- customizable versions of various Google products. Nothing to do with App Engine.

A bit different. What I would like to do is instead of provisioning users on my own appengine instances, give them a button where they can sign in with their own Google accounts and deploy the same code to their own instances, where they can then take care of their own billing, integrate with their own users, etc.

Add to that a way to customize the price so that in addition to the appengine billing the developer gets an extra $x per month for app licensing

Edit: for those interested, there is more info in this Issue : http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=58...

It has been acknowledged and given a priority of medium. Hopefully that Amazon announcement will prompt something more out of them.

I requested this in the group last year: http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_threa...

if anybody else is interested in this please star the issue

One advantage of the image-based model of the AWS marketplace is that you can support nearly any type of product and multiple operating systems, so you can adapt existing products rather than have to write your app specifically for AppEngine

This is Huge! EC2 has made provisioning hardware and OS's stupid simple but building a rock solid stack is still beyond most people.

Now you can use supported production stacks, for instance https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B0078VKDDI/ref=brs_res... is a supported Rails production stack its secure and has an SLA... This is a big deal.

As in my other comment, they are using an old version of Nginx.

My point is more general than that specific stack, the concept of one click deployment stacks which are built by Sys-Admins and have support is a big deal.

As is mine. This is a great move by Amazon, but there is a huge security risk if the community doesn't squeeze out bad practice.

I wonder if they will allow multiple apps sold from the marketplace to run on the same instance? I haven't gone through the process yet of setting up an instance via the marketplace, but I think that it's essential that I can a.) install multiple copies of the same software on an instance and run them via virtual hosting (for example running multiple Wordpress instances on a single node and b.) allow different kinds of software to run on a single instance (let's say an instance with a bug tracker and a log analysis tool, just as a made-up example).

The other thing that I find interesting is that there doesn't seem to be an API yet. I would love to be able to provision apps on nodes via an API to the marketplace.

I'm definitely going to play around with it a bit and see what's possible though.

You can do this with the Bitnami instances available in the marketplace. You can launch one of the LAMP-based ones and then download modules from bitnami.org and install them from the command line

The only thing that struck out at me as odd from this announcement was that it wasn't phrased like: "Amazon is excited to announce!" (Most of you probably know what I'm talking about)...

http://blog.mailchimp.com/the-email-person-at-amazon-web-ser...

This is the first ever ever product announcement that I've ever seen Amazon make where they weren't excited to announce.

> Amazon Web Services is pleased to announce AWS Marketplace, an online store where customers can find, buy, and quickly deploy software that runs on AWS.

Whoever writes the AWS announcement emails probably read that blog post, and has sworn off the phrase for life.

This time s?he was simply pleased. Maybe s?he doesn't like this one.

Amazon Web Services is pleased to announce AWS Marketplace, an online store where customers can find, buy, and quickly deploy software that runs on AWS.

haha, nice comment from Jeff Barr in that article

We’re excited to see that you are excited about our excitement over our exciting series of releases. If we change to another adjective, the only logical post title would be “Amazon is no longer excited.” And that wouldn’t be too exciting now, would it?

Great, now I can't unhear the announcement in Droopey's voice.

It may be a Seattle-area thing. When I worked at Microsoft, the "super excited" phrase was a bit of a running joke, but it still didn't stop us from using it at every conference, in every public e-mail, hallways, etc.

Search for Microsoft AND "super excited" and you will not be disappointed. You will see both modern hits and results dating back to the dark, dim days of web indexing, from which results are rarely returned.

It's good to see this coming. However I don't understand the price structure some vendors are offering. Take Zend Server(below is the link) as an example, why should they charge a lot more on high-memory/high-cpu instance? Is it because the incurred traffic or usage is much higher? How does this compare to setup your own server but buy server license from them.

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B0078UB5X6/ref=gtw_msl...

The typical enterprise pricing approach is to try to price according to their value, not to your costs. If you are willing to pay up for a bigger server, you are probably getting more value, and therefore should pay more.

So suddenly you can have managers telling their sysadmins they've set up a new SQL server? That's pretty big.

A lot of us get those emails from amazon.com, like the one this morning, "Introducing AWS Marketplace -- Find and Buy Software that Runs on the AWS Cloud". This is great, but I have a friend who likes reading about these but doesn't want to launch servers. Is there some way people can subscribe to the Amazon AWS mailing list without creating an AWS account?

Why not create an AWS account? It's free and you don't have to "launch servers" or do anything else with it.

And if you already have an Amazon.com account, you can use it for AWS as well.

I guess RSS is the best option. Even if you don't have to launch servers I still believe you need to confirm your phone number and some other things. I'm just looking for a way to share news with friends without having to forward the e-mails every time.

But.. but.. HN told me there's a war on RSS!

RSS: https://aws.amazon.com/rss/whats-new.rss

Quick write-up here: http://webdev360.com/amazon-cements-cloud-dominance-with-aws... I like how this isn't competing directly with MS's Azure Marketplace, which seems more focused on data, sector-specific SaaS, etc.

I wondered about this. I've used Azure at multiple companies but ever really looked into at their marketplace. I did find this though: https://datamarket.azure.com/browse/Applications

Amazon's scaling of the AppStore to business is brilliant. This will bring the SaaS to small companies.

Does anyone have a clue why Amazon never pays any attention to graphic design if its pages/products?

It hasn't held them back. I wonder if it's a case of their services been so unique, cheap, competitive, etc. or if we overrate design and it's not really that important. I tend to think it's the former, but it's an interesting example.

Maybe they're too busy making money?

What's wrong with the design on that page?

My issue isn't so much with design but rather the fact that you have to register a new account with them every time you want to use a new service. This is almost certainly legacy complexity from the days that these services were not exposed through API's, but it is still a pain in the ass.

Other than it being a bit too crowded, there's not much wrong with it. IMHO, many of the sites I see on here are over designed.

I'm confused. What's the difference, other than Amazon taking a 20% cut of my sale price, between this and the already existing paid AMIs? Yeah, there's a pretty website and all, but it doesn't seem like much value for 20%.

Marketing is worth a lot.

Anyone have any idea what is amazon's cut from sellers?

"80% of the funds collected are dispersed to the software vendor and AWS Marketplace charges a service fee of 20%."

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/help/200904140/ref=help_l...

That's quite reasonable for Amazon!

Pricing for selling/listing feels alright given the market place platform...

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/help/200904140/ref=help_l...

Free for open source and BYOL. 20% service fee for commercial.

The listing of Linux images including EC2 charges is scary. I hope this isn't their long term plans. If so, we'll have to start coding our way out of their vendor lock-in.

You're sending the wrong vibes, Amazon.

There are plenty of free images (you only get charged by the AWS resources used, not the software itself)

The guy in the video said "software" at a rate of 10.3 per minute

I wonder if you can make something of a failed startup here?

Question: Are there any software which can to obfuscate / protect RubyOnRails, Phyton, and PHP application code so it packaged and sold via AWS?

Question: why is this downvoted?

Irrelevant, and use Google, and why??? (rhetorical)

Why it is irrelevant? I want to sell my application via AWS so users can deploy my AWS image with my application by I want to protect my IP. How to do it?

Perhaps you could disallow ssh login and only provide a web interface to users.

Ruby could be obfuscated by compiling to a jar using JRuby. Presumably something similar could be done with Python and Jython, and PHP can be compiled into C++ using Facebook's Hiphop compiler they open-sourced.

Wow, is there anything Amazon doesn't sell?

Really great platform. What's next?

Yeh, pretty good for a bookstore.

Yeah, AWS Marketplace is great. But why does the design/ux have to be so second rate? It could be so much better.

Maybe it is deliberate?

There is some thinking that beautiful is not always more effective:

http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/keep-it-simple-...

Craigslist, POF .... Maybe Amazon know something we don't? Or they have too much legacy code that they cannot change?

> Or they have too much legacy code that they cannot change?

Changing the css isn't some legacy code that can't be changed.

The future is Marketplace

Competition for Salesforce.

Congrats bushi.do, sgrove and YC on the acquisition!

Kidding aside, this must feel like wonderful validation all around on the market.

i bet you anything cloud stocks rally today

crm, amzn gonna rally

why on earth was i downvoted? ??? are you guys NOT looking at the charts???? note that i made my call BEFORE the market opened ... and i was right

AMZN is up about a percent, which is not at all unusual and can hardly be attributed to them launching Marketplace. Hell, they were up that much yesterday.

new information always changes things.

Some new information for you, then: AMZN is currently in negative territory today.

cool story bro

Haha, I appreciate the sentiment. And yeah, Amazon's marketplace is pretty exciting for us as well - their approach is obviously quite different, but it's very cool to see movement like this higher up on the stack.

HN is not recognizing duplicate link submissions for the AWS market place...

http://iterin.blogspot.in/2012/04/hacker-news-not-recognizin...

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