AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

Category: AWS Marketplace

New AWS Marketplace IoT Discovery Webpage Accelerates IoT Innovation

AWS Marketplace now has an IoT discovery webpage that makes it easier for you to buy IoT software from popular software vendors that’s integrated with, or running on, AWS Cloud services. This page features 17 IoT software providers.

IoT is a complex industry represented by connected devices and the data they produce, supported by a variety of interrelated technologies across hardware and software platforms. The IoT value chain consists of several categories, including hardware (sensors, edge devices, gateways), connectivity, cloud and infrastructure, applications, and professional services. The IoT space is growing at a rapid-fire pace, and presents a nearly overwhelming selection for customers who want to find the right products to integrate into their AWS IoT projects. Customers look to AWS Marketplace for IoT software solutions, and the new IoT discovery webpage will help them make sense of the fragmented environment of products and software by placing these services in one easy-to-find location.

AWS Marketplace is a sales channel that software companies use to offer software solutions to AWS customers. You can easily find and buy software as a service (SaaS) products, Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), or AWS CloudFormation template-based software deployments from popular software vendors. The software solutions listed on the IoT discovery webpage integrate with AWS IoT or other AWS services, and are billed to the customer’s AWS account rather than being billed by the vendor.

AWS Marketplace vendors offer over 60 products with IoT use cases, across networking, security, database, business intelligence, and other categories. The AWS Marketplace IoT discovery webpage helps customers select the right products faster by showcasing products within the following subcategories, to reduce the time and resources required to discover, procure, and implement an IoT project:

  • Edge, gateway, and connectivity: Includes software to manage data ingestion, device certificates/security, edge processing on the gateway, and global connectivity.
  • Development tools: Offers solutions to help partners and customers build best-in-class applications, reducing the friction developers face today when building IoT applications.
  • Data analytics and machine learning: Offers solutions to turn data into meaningful information to support business insights and outcomes.

Today’s featured partners who have earned the AWS IoT Competency include Eseye, Bsquare, ThingLogix, Splunk and Bright Wolf.

 

Pinacl is a Consulting Partner that leveraged the AWS Marketplace IoT selection to deliver IoT services quickly to Newport City Council, in Wales.

“ConnectThing.io on AWS Marketplace made it possible for Pinacl to very quickly launch a smart city proof of concept for Newport that is powered by AWS,” says Mark Lowe, strategic relations director at Pinacl. “If you’re setting up infrastructure the traditional way, in phase one, you have to set up to handle thousands of sensors when you might only want to start with 10. Using ConnecThing.io on AWS meant Newport could start small with very little investment or risk and figure out which projects delivered the most value.”

 

“Our experience in dealing with industrial IoT deployments across a number of market segments shows data is the primary determinant in achieving the business outcomes our customers seek,” said Dave McCarthy, Bsquare Senior Director of Products. “By making DataV Discover available in AWS Marketplace, businesses can quickly determine IoT use cases that their data will support, thereby reducing risk and maximizing the probability of success.”

Now, you can more easily navigate, discover, and purchase the software and services needed as we  build successful IoT solutions and applications to fuel innovation and their business.

Get started building your IoT solution by visiting: https://aws.amazon.com/mp/iot.

 

 

 

Partner SA Roundup – July 2017

This month, Juan Villa, Pratap Ramamurthy, and Roy Rodan from the Emerging Partner SA team highlight a few of the partners they work with. They’ll be exploring Microchip, Domino, and Cohesive Networks.

Microchip Zero Touch Secure Provisioning Kit, by Juan Villa

AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that enables connected devices to easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices. In order for devices to interact with AWS IoT via the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol, they must first authenticate using Transport Layer Security (TLS) mutual authentication. This process involves the use of X.509 certificates on both the devices and in AWS IoT. A single certificate contains a private and a public key component. An IoT device needs to store the private key that corresponds to its certificate in order to establish a TLS connection with mutual authentication.

Private keys can be somewhat difficult to store securely on IoT devices. It’s easy to simply store data on a device’s local memory, but this is not enough to protect the key from tampering. It’s quite easy, and affordable, to purchase the necessary hardware to read the content of the memory from most microcontrollers and memory components used on IoT devices. This means that private keys used for authentication and establishing trust need to be stored in a secure manner.

This is where a secure element chip comes in! Microchip, an APN Advanced Technology Partner, is a silicon manufacturer that makes a secure element chip called the ATECC508A. This chip has a hardware-based secure key storage mechanism that is tamper-proof. In fact, once a key is stored in the ATECC508A, its contents cannot be read. The chip accomplishes this with hardware-based cryptographic acceleration features that allow it to perform cryptographic operations very quickly and with power efficiency. When considering ATECC508A for your product, keep in mind that Microchip can preload certificates on the secure element during manufacturing, before delivery. Combining this feature with AWS IoT’s support for custom certificate authorities and just-in-time registration can streamline device provisioning and security.

To make this secure element chip easy for you to try out, Microchip makes an evaluation kit called the Zero Touch Secure Provisioning Kit. This kit includes a SAM G55 Cortex-M4 microcontroller, the ATECC508A secure element, and an ATWINC1500 power-efficient 802.11 b/g/n module, and comes with instructions on how to get started with AWS IoT. With this combination of silicon products you can begin testing and developing your next IoT product in a secure fashion.

Before you work on your next IoT project, I recommend that you consider a secure element in your design. For more information on ATECC508A, please read the datasheet on the Microchip website.

 

Domino Data Science Platform, by Pratap Ramamurthy

Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics are all data science techniques. Data scientists analyze data, search for insights that can be extracted, and build predictive models to solve business problems. To help data scientists with these tasks, a new set of tools, like Jupyter notebooks, as well as a wide variety of software packages ranging from deep learning neural network frameworks, like MXNet, to CUDA drivers, are becoming popular. Data science as a field is growing rapidly as companies increase their reliance on these new technologies.

However, supporting a team of data scientists can be challenging. They need access to different tools and software packages, as well as a variety of servers connected to the cloud. They want to collaborate by sharing projects, not just code or results. They want to be able to publish models with minimal friction. While data scientists want flexibility, companies need to ensure security and compliance. Companies also need to understand resource how resources like data and compute power are being used.

Domino, an APN Advanced Technology Partner, solves these challenges by providing a convenient platform for data scientists to spin up interactive workspaces using the tools that they already know and love e.g., Jupyter, RStudio, Zeppelin, as well as commercial languages like SAS and Matlab, as seen in the diagram below.

Image used with permission

In the Domino platform, users can run experiments on a wide variety of instances that mirror the latest Amazon EC2 options provided by AWS, as seen in the screenshot. Customers can run a notebook on instances with up to 2 TB of RAM with the AWS X1 instance family. If more computational power is needed, you can switch the same notebook to GPU instances as necessary or connect to a Spark cluster.

Because the software used for data science and machine learning has several layers, and new software technologies are introduced and adopted rapidly, the data science environment is often difficult to deploy and manage. Domino solves this problem by storing the notebooks, along with the software dependencies, inside a Docker image.  This allows the same code to be rerun consistently in the future. There is no need to manually reconstruct the software, and this saves valuable time for data scientists.

Domino helps data scientists share and collaborate. They have introduced the software development concepts of code sharing, peer review, and discussions seamlessly into the data science platform.

For companies that have not yet started their cloud migration, Domino on AWS makes data science an excellent first project. Domino runs entirely on AWS and integrates well into many AWS services. Customers who have stored large amounts of data in Amazon S3 can easily access it from within Domino. After training their models by using this data, they can easily deploy their machine learning model into AWS with a click of a button, and within minutes access it using an API. All of these features help data scientists focus on data science and not the underlying platform.

Today, Domino Data Science Platform is available as a SaaS offering at the Domino website. Additionally, if you prefer to run the Domino software in your own virtual private cloud (VPC), you can install the supporting software by using an AWS CloudFormation template that will be provided to you. If you prefer a dedicated VPC setting, Domino also offers a managed service offering, which runs Data Science Platform in a separate VPC. Before considering those options, get a quick feel for the platform by signing up for a free trial.

 

Cohesive Networks, by Roy Rodan

Many AWS customers have a hybrid network topology where part of their infrastructure is on premises and part is within the AWS Cloud. Most IT experts and developers aren’t concerned with where the infrastructure resides—all they want is easy access to all their resources, remote or local, from their local networks.

So how do you manage all these networks as a single distributed network in a secure fashion? The configuration and maintenance of such a complex environment can be challenging.

Cohesive Networks, an APN Advanced Technology Partner, has a product called VNS3:vpn, which helps alleviate some of these challenges. The VNS3 product family helps you build and manage a secure, highly available, and self-healing network between multiple regions, cloud providers, and/or physical data centers. VNS3:vpn is available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) on the AWS Marketplace, and can be deployed on an Amazon EC2 instance inside your VPCs.

One of the interesting features of VNS3 is its ability to create meshed connectivity between multiple locations and run an overlay network on top. This effectively creates a single distributed network across locations by peering several remote VNS3 controllers.

Here is an example of a network architecture that uses VNS3 for peering:

The VNS3 controllers act as six machines in one, to address all your network needs:

  • Router
  • Switch
  • SSL/IPsec VPN concentrator
  • Firewall
  • Protocol redistributor
  • Extensible network functions virtualization (NFV)

The setup process is straightforward and well-documented with both how-to videos and detailed configuration guides.

Cohesive Networks also provides a web-based monitoring and management system called VNS3:ms in a separate server, where you can update your network topology, fail over between VNS3 controllers, and monitor your network and instances’ performance.

See the  VNS3 family offerings from Cohesive Networks in AWS Marketplace, and start building your secured, cross-connected network.  Also, be sure to head over to the Cohesive Networks website to learn more about the VNS3 product family.

Announcing SaaS Contracts, a Feature to Simplify SaaS Procurement on AWS Marketplace

Since the inception of AWS Marketplace, we’ve prioritized customer and seller feedback as our starting point for driving Marketplace improvements. In response to customers and sellers pointing to software as a service (SaaS) as their preferred software delivery mechanism, we launched AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscriptions in November 2016. SaaS Subscriptions enables sellers to offer their SaaS solutions directly to AWS customers, with all charges consolidated on the customer’s bill alongside other services bought directly from AWS or through AWS Marketplace.

Our goal is to continue to enable SaaS sellers and drive additional value for customers. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of the AWS Marketplace SaaS Contracts, which allows sellers to offer monthly, one, two, and three year contracts for SaaS and application programming interface (API) products.

What’s the benefit of SaaS Contracts for customers?

This new capability gives AWS customers more options and flexibility in how they procure software through AWS Marketplace. Customers can use a shopping-cart like experience to determine the number of included units and the duration of their contract. Customers can take advantage of potential cost savings resulting from longer-term contracts and will have the ability to expand their subscriptions at any time. Customers that purchase monthly contracts can expand to a one, two, or three year contract term as needed, and can take advantage of automatic, configurable renewals. Today, customers can now subscribe to over 70 SaaS products, giving AWS customers even greater selection.

How does this impact sellers?

SaaS Contracts provides sellers even more options for monetizing their solutions to AWS customers. In addition to the pay-as-you-go options provided by SaaS Subscriptions, sellers can now provide services that require up-front payment or offer discounts for committed usage amounts. Sellers can offer customers a monthly option – good for customers that want to test software before making a longer commitment. From here, a buyer can easily upgrade to a one, two, or three year contract term. With simple auto-renewal options for customers, it’s easier to manage your ongoing relationship with customers. After creating a new contract, Marketplace buyers are passed to the seller’s website, along with an encrypted token containing their customer identifier and product code. This experience is identical to the registration process for AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscriptions. Sellers use the customer identifier to check the customer’s entitlement by calling the AWS Marketplace entitlement service at any time, meaning sellers can rely on AWS Marketplace to serve as their primary entitlement store.

How do I get started as a seller?

We’ve made it simple for you to deliver your solution as a SaaS offering through AWS Marketplace. Once you have established your AWS Marketplace Seller account, you’ll need to select your billing dimension. You can choose from the existing options (users, hosts, data, units, tiers, bandwidth or requests) 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, download and fill out the product load form for SaaS Contracts. 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 modify your registration page to receive the token containing the customer identifier and product code. You’ll also have to modify your application to call the new AWS Marketplace Entitlement Service to check the size and duration of your customer’s contract. You can download the AWS software development kit (SDK) that will help you format your metering records in any of the AWS supported languages. As a final step, you can choose to listen to notifications on a Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic for when your customers modify their contract. 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?

At launch, AWS Marketplace SaaS Contracts features products from 20 sellers: Alert Logic, AppDynamics, Box, Cloudberry Labs, CloudHealth, Davra Networks, Device Authority, Flowroute, Informatica, Lucidchart, Mnubo, NetApp, Pitney Bowes, Simularity, Splunk, SumoLogic, ThingLogix, Threat Stack, Trend Micro, and TSOLogic. Over the next few months, we expect more than a dozen additional sellers to release products. Visit here to see all the SaaS products available on AWS Marketplace.

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://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/management/tour/.

Save the Date – End of Life for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)

By David Duncan. David is a Partner Solutions Architect (SA) with AWS.

On February 23, 2017, Leann Ogasawara, Canonical’s Kernel Team Manager, announced the April 28th, 2017 end of life for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (code-named Precise Pangolin) to the Kernel Support Release Update mailing list. AWS customers use Ubuntu for a wide variety of projects across workloads that range from the very simple to the extremely complex. Customers like Netflix, partners like Pivotal, and many others choose to run their workloads with Ubuntu. The AWS Partner team works closely with the Canonical Public Cloud team to ensure that the Ubuntu experience is optimal for our common customers. In support of this goal, we want to make certain that AWS customers have a number of opportunities to properly prepare for the deprecation process with confidence as we move toward the sunset of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which was originally launched in April 2012.

Canonical releases a version of Ubuntu every six months. Releases are made according to a timed schedule and include development releases and there are Long Term Support (commonly known as LTS) versions. The LTS versions are released every two years in the month of April.

The LTS releases are fully supported for 5 years with security and bug fixes. According to Canonical’s defined policies for product lifecycle, the support for Ubuntu 12.04 – where the version number specifies the April 2012 release date –  ends in April 2017. The supported upgrade path is to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (April 2014 release) or, preferably, to 16.04 LTS (April 2016 release). The 16.04 LTS release exhibits by far the strongest security story for Ubuntu yet, and, since October, the Canonical Livepatch Service has been available for fixing kernel vulnerabilities without the need for rebooting.

Let’s take a moment and review the major dates related to the end of life for Ubuntu 12.04 that affect AWS customers. For more details on the important events throughout the lifecycle of Ubuntu releases, you can review the list of releases on the Ubuntu Wiki pages.

  • April 8, 2017 – AWS Support will send e-mail notifications to customers who are running instances created with 12.04 AMIs in the past 6 months. They will announce the upcoming removal of the Ubuntu Precise archives mirrors and the actions to follow.
  • April 28, 2017 – Access to Ubuntu 12.04 mirrors associated with the AWS instances will no longer be available. Ubuntu 12.04 AMIs will be made available only for automated installs.
  • August 28, 2017 –AMIs will be removed completely by the Canonical Public Cloud team as the final step in the end of life for this release.

Canonical provides a simple tool to identify the current support status for Ubuntu deployments. The ubuntu-support-status command provides immediate feedback on the lifecycle status of any currently deployed Ubuntu instance, similar to the following:

From this sample output, I can see that my 12.04 instance is supported until April 2017. While you can run this handy command to determine when you need to upgrade, you can also keep up to date with all Ubuntu lifecycle events by following the Ubuntu Releases wiki page.

In Canonical’s March 14th Announcement,  AWS users learned they can still access security patches and key updates for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS by purchasing a support contract with Canonical through the AWS Marketplace. Canonical’s support package, Ubuntu Advantage, is available through the AWS Marketplace at an hourly rate, with centralized billing through AWS. It provides access to systems management tooling, professional support, and SLAs, and live patching at scale.

Email announcements will be sent to the primary contact for each account. Be on the lookout for this customer announcement.

Docker for AWS – Now Available in the AWS Marketplace

AWS customers now have the ability to purchase Docker for AWS via the AWS Marketplace. Docker for AWS is available at no additional cost (Docker Community Edition, CE) or as a supported subscription offering (Docker Enterprise Edition, EE). Both Docker CE and Docker EE offer a toolset that allows customers to deploy a “Container as a Service” in their AWS account with the help of a simple AWS CloudFormation template. Docker for AWS handles deploying the Docker manager and Docker worker nodes, as well as the required underlying AWS components. Docker CE is great for developers and small teams getting started with containers; you’ll find both monthly and quarterly releases of CE for those who want to stay on the bleeding edge. Docker EE is for Enterprises looking for a supported and certified CaaS solution, including integrated image, container, and user management and security.

Both Docker CE and EE for AWS stacks bring a number of AWS service integrations to help customers realize the advantages of running Docker on the AWS Cloud. For example, Auto Scaling, multi-AZ deployments, and healthchecks are available out of the box to help ensure cluster resiliency. AWS CloudFormation Stack Updates are used for upgrades of the cluster, rolling out changes to one manager and one worker node at a time, helping prevent downtime for your applications. Elastic Load Balancing integration is also provided by default, which makes it easy to deploy applications that are ready to scale up as your traffic increases.

Let’s take a quick look at deploying and getting started with Docker for AWS. First, we’ll launch the CloudFormation stack and specify some parameters that determine how our Docker swarm cluster is configured. We can configure values like how many manager nodes we want (choose 3 or 5), what instances to use for managers and the Docker swarm cluster itself, and how much storage we want to allocate to each node. There are also some neat options to enable here, like auto-cleanup, which automatically purges unused resources, and Amazon CloudWatch logs logging, which will push logs from your entire cluster to CloudWatch logs.

Docker_EE_for_AWS_1

Once the stack has completed launching, take a look at the “Outputs” tab and find the link to see the Manager instances. SSH into one of these and we’ll deploy a sample app. (Hint: you can also configure your local Docker client to use the Swarm cluster: https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/swarm-tutorial/)

$ ssh -I my-key.pem docker@manager-node-ip

We can then check that the cluster is up and running:

Docker_EE_for_AWS_2

Great! Let’s deploy a quick sample app – I’m a fan of the voting app in the Docker getting started guide: https://docs.docker.com/engine/getstarted-voting-app/

$ curl –O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/docker/example-voting-app/master/docker-stack.yml

Docker_EE_for_AWS_3

We can then see that our services are running:

Docker_EE_for_AWS_3_1

Let’s check the front end app into the ELB:

Docker_EE_for_AWS_3_2

Cool. Let’s hit the ELB and see our app in action:

Docker_EE_for_AWS_4

Alright, time to wrap this up. To check out the templates, subscribe to the products in the AWS Marketplace here, and give Docker for AWS a spin today.

It’s Day One For Our Healthcare and Life Sciences Partners – Looking Ahead to 2017

Aaron Friedman is a Healthcare and Life Sciences Partner Solutions Architect with Amazon Web Services

Over this past week, we’ve seen how many of our Healthcare and Life Sciences Partners architect compliant workloads on AWS (and these were just a couple of highlights from our Healthcare and Life Sciences Competency Partner base!). I’m continuously impressed at the innovative ways our Healthcare & Life Sciences Partners are raising the bar to deliver meaningful solutions across the healthcare and life sciences spectrum to their customers.

As we commonly say here at AWS, it is still Day One. I have found that this saying is extremely applicable to our APN Partners. Just as we are rapidly innovating to meet the needs of AWS Customers and APN Partners, so too are our APN Partners innovating with a goal to deliver the best possible experience to their customers on AWS. This week, we had the pleasure of profiling a number of APN Partners in the healthcare and life sciences space to learn exactly how they take advantage of AWS to drive customer success. Let’s take a look back at these posts now.

As we begin to close out this week, I’d like to tell you about a few more of our Healthcare and Life Sciences Partners and their Day One outlook for 2017. It should be a great year to be a Healthcare and Life Sciences Partner with AWS!

Medidata

For the last 17 years, Medidata Solutions has been collecting, storing, managing and analyzing clinical trial data. Working with approximately 800 life sciences customers, the cloud-based company has amassed one of the largest sets of clinical data assets in the world. “As Medidata has grown, our relationship with AWS has become increasingly important,” says Pramod Somashekar, Senior Manager, Data Science at Medidata. “Instead of focusing staff time and energy on infrastructure support, AWS allows us to put our efforts into deploying new apps—ultimately meeting and exceeding the needs of our customers.”

A key focus area for Medidata, an AWS Life Sciences Competency Partner, in 2017 will be expanding its Clinical Trial Genomics solution, which links patients’ genomic data to their clinical trial records. This solution holds real promise for the life sciences industry, as genomic data can be mined for biomarkers that improve clinical trial inclusion and exclusion criteria, patient randomization, adaptive prevention, and the identification of new precision therapies. Launched at re:Invent 2016, AWS Step Functions has helped Medidata coordinate large-scale distributed genomics applications. “For true real-time clinical trial genomics analyses, we are required to take a single genomic sample and run that through a maze of complex processing pipelines and workflows to get an end result. With Step Functions, our main project focus and planning has shifted from ‘how do we chain and coordinate these processes together’ to ‘what do we want this thing to do’. That is a really powerful shift,” says Pramod. “Using AWS has given us a lot of flexibility, helping us tune products and conduct pilots faster.”

We featured Medidata on the APN Blog this past August. Check it out here.

Sturdy Networks

Sturdy Networks is a APN Consulting Partner who holds both the AWS Healthcare and IoT Competencies. Naturally, the team at Sturdy is very excited to continue the convergence of these two disciplines. “Sturdy is most excited about the intersection of healthcare and IoT,” says Tolga Tarhan, CTO. “We’re working with medical device manufactures to connect devices to the cloud and enable entirely new classes of devices that can leverage the computing power of the AWS Cloud. We believe this will help to deliver better experiences to medical professionals, and better outcomes to patients.”

In 2017, Sturdy is most excited to see where the intersection of IoT, medical devices, and big data meet in the cloud. From what Sturdy has seen, for the last few years, an increasing number of medical devices have been connecting to the cloud. Initially this connectivity was used for what Sturdy refers to as “ecosystem” apps: things that weren’t core to the medical device, but formed an ecosystem around it, such as mobile apps.

Recently, Sturdy has started to see more and more instances in which a core part of a medical device was cloud-powered. Sturdy Networks believes that the Internet of Medical Things has the potential to disrupt how we practice medicine by providing high-resolution longitudinal quantification of our health. Take for example the ability to add cloud-based intelligence to a device that diagnoses a particular condition. In what ways could cloud-powered Big Data solutions lead to more accuracy and improve diagnostic results?

With device connectivity becoming ubiquitous, Sturdy is very excited to help customers leverage AWS IoT and big data offerings deliver new healthcare solutions to the market.

Syapse

Syapse’s goal is to transform healthcare with precision medicine. Having developed its precision medicine platform on AWS, Syapse, an AWS Healthcare Technology Competency Partner, is able to focus on scaling the company’s differentiated precision medicine platform and provide additional value to its healthcare customers. “In order to scale our infrastructure to meet the needs of our business, we have focused heavily on templatizing all of our infrastructure-as-code,” says Nick Steel, Syapse’s Director of Cloud Operations. “In 2017, one of our key focuses is on continuing to optimize our continuous integration and continuous delivery approach for both our software as well as the environment in which it runs. Not only does this help us from a compliance standpoint, but we are able to quickly deploy our platform for new customers, which helps us ensure that our technology can scale with our business, both domestically and internationally.”

One of the additional benefits of infrastructure-as-code is an increased pace of innovation. After AWS announced HIPAA-eligibility for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL at re:Invent 2016, Syapse was able to quickly integrate this managed database service into its platform. By testing each component independently and then making the appropriate updates to their Terraform configurations, the Syapse team tells us they are able to quickly adopt new HIPAA-eligible services and further enhance the platform. “We’re excited every time AWS adds new HIPAA-eligible services to their program,” says Nick. “Each time a new service is added we find that we can further accelerate our pace of innovation.”

Syapse was featured on the AWS Blog last February in a post entitled, “How The Healthcare of Tomorrow is Being Delivered Today” – read it here.

Connect with Healthcare and Life Sciences Competency Partners on AWS

 

AWS Healthcare Competency Partners have demonstrated success in building solutions for healthcare payers and providers that securely store, process, transmit, and analyze clinical information. Working with these Competency Partners gives you access to innovative, cloud-based solutions that have a proven track record handling clinical data.

Consulting Partners:

  • 8KMiles
  • ClearDATA
  • Cloudticity
  • Cognizant
  • Connectria Hosting
  • CorpInfo
  • Flux7
  • G2 Technology Group
  • Logicworks
  • Mobiquity
  • Sturdy Networks

Technology Partners:

 

Clinical Information Systems

  • Calgary Scientific
  • Practice Fusion
  • Syapse

Population Health & Analytics

  • QuintilesIMS
  • Philips
  • hc1.com

Health Administration

  • Appian
  • Captricity
  • Infor
  • Pegasystems

Compliance Services

  • Aptible

Life Science Competency Partners help you conduct drug discovery, manage clinical trials, engage in manufacturing and distribution activities, conduct research and development of novel genetic-based treatments and companion diagnostics.

Consulting Partners:

  • 2nd Watch
  • 8KMiles
  • BioTeam Inc.
  • Booz Allen Hamilton
  • Cognizant
  • Flux7
  • G2 Technology Group
  • HCL
  • Infosys
  • Mobiquity
  • REAN Cloud
  • Wipro

Technology Partners:

  • Appian
  • DNAnexus
  • Core Informatics
  • Cycle Computing
  • Medidata
  • Seven Bridges Genomics
  • Syapse
  • Turbot

Conclusion

Healthcare and Life Sciences Partners are constantly developing innovative solutions for healthcare and life sciences on AWS. And as you can see, we highlight companies with proven expertise and customer success in these areas through our AWS Competency program. I also want to highlight that today marked the launch of the Healthcare & Life Sciences Category on AWS Marketplace. Through this category, you can find solutions from clinical information systems for healthcare organizations to molecular modeling tools for life science companies that you can procure through AWS Marketplace. Learn more here.

Will you be at HIMSS? Comment below, and please be sure to stop by booth #6969 and chat with us and some of our Healthcare Partners next week. I hope to see you there!

The content and opinions in this blog are those of the author and is not an endorsement of the third-party products discussed. AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post. This blog is intended for informational purposes and not for the purpose of providing legal advice.

AWS Marketplace Adds Healthcare & Life Sciences Category

Enabling organizations on AWS with best-of-breed healthcare and life sciences solutions that accelerate scientific discovery, drive insights from clinical data, and improve operational efficiency.

This is a guest post from the Wilson To, Sr. Category Leader – HCLS, AWS Marketplace. 

Healthcare and life sciences companies deal with huge amounts of data, and many of their data sets are some of the most complex in the world. From physicians and nurses to researchers and analysts, these users are typically hampered by their existing systems. Their legacy software cannot let them efficiently store or effectively make use of the immense amounts of data they work with. Additionally, protracted and complex software purchasing cycles keep them from innovating at speed to stay ahead of market and industry demands.  Together, we can change this.

AWS Marketplace helps software vendors reach healthcare and life science organizations by listing their best-of-breed software solutions in a curated software catalog that allows customers to easily discover, evaluate, procure, immediately deploy and manage 3rd party software, enabling customers to innovate faster and reduce costs throughout their organizations. We continue to create new opportunities for AWS Marketplace sellers by adding new industry-specific verticals to AWS Marketplace, such as the addition of the Healthcare & Life Sciences category.

We understand that no single company can solve all of the challenges across healthcare and life sciences – that’s why we want to continue to work with AWS Marketplace Sellers to drive impact across the industry. If you offer a software solution that was specially designed to serve the healthcare and life sciences industry or have a business practice or vertical that creates value for these customers, please let us know so that you can get on board. We have divided our solutions for healthcare and life sciences companies into these sub-categories. Which category does your solution fit into?

Clinical Information Systems

Transactional systems that are used in the provider setting. These solutions capture and document clinical encounters, as well as provide direct patient care.

Population Health & Analytics

Organizational and enterprise solutions that analyze and manage patient, population, quality, and operational data in order to improve cost and quality objectives.

Health Administration

Solutions that address operational requirements of the healthcare enterprise — including revenue cycle management, and ERP.

Healthcare Compliance Services

Consulting services and solutions that assist healthcare organizations with compliance and regulatory support, including system architecture.

Genomics and Research Computing

Solutions designed for high-performance compute and workflow management for scientific workloads, like genomics sequencing, computational chemistry and preclinical development.

Commercial Enablement

Solutions designed to enable coordinated sales and marketing activities, like sales automation, marketing automation, multichannel marketing, etc.

Clinical Trial Management and Product Development

Solutions that assist life sciences customers with managing products through clinical development and commercial launch, including collaboration with contract research organizations (CROs), and patient recruitment.

Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management

Solutions that support manufacturing and supply chain workflows for life sciences and medical technology product manufacturers, including  collaboration platforms for customers, suppliers, and contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs).

Business Intelligence / Analytics

Organizational and enterprise solutions that provide data analysis and visualization technology for business operations, from R&D to manufacturing and alignment.

Life Sciences Compliance Services

Solutions that assist healthcare organizations with compliance and regulatory support, like GxP and pharmacovigilance solutions.

 

AWS Marketplace also supports Consulting Partners that specialize in healthcare & life sciences. If you fit this profile and want to become an AWS Marketplace Channel Partner, contact MP_reseller_program@amazon.com. Channel programs are also available to support you as you grow your business.

Click here to learn more information about becoming an APN Partner and seller on AWS Marketplace.

 

More about AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace contains more than 5,000 listings across more than 35 categories. It simplifies vendor software solution distribution by providing a platform to manage software licensing and procurement that enables customers to accept user agreements, choose pricing options, and automate the deployment of software and associated AWS resources with just a few clicks. AWS Marketplace also simplifies billing for customers by delivering a single invoice detailing business software and AWS resource usage on a monthly basis.

How to Best Architect Your AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscription Across Multiple AWS Accounts

This is a guest post from David Aiken. David is a Partner SA who focuses on AWS Marketplace.  

In my first post following the launch of AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscriptions, I provided a quick overview to describe the concepts, integration points, and how to get started with the AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscription feature. In this post, I walk through best practices for architecting your AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscription across multiple AWS accounts. Let’s begin!

Overview

Calls to the SaaS Subscriptions APIs, ResolveCustomer and BatchMeterUsage, must be signed by credentials from your AWS Marketplace Seller account. This does not mean that your SaaS code needs to run in the AWS MP Seller account. The best practice is to host your production code in a separate AWS account, and use cross-account roles and sts:AssumeRole to obtain temporary credentials which can then be used to call the AWS MP Metering APIs. This post walks you through how this can be implemented.

Accounts

In our example, there are two AWS accounts:

  • AWS Marketplace Seller Account – this is the account your organization has registered as a seller in AWS Marketplace. API calls must be authenticated from credentials in this account.
  • AWS Accounts for Production Code – this is the AWS account where your SaaS service is hosted.

Why Use Separate Accounts?

Sellers should only use a single AWS Account as the AWS Marketplace account. This simplifies management and avoids any confusion for customers viewing an ISV’s products and services.

Separating the Seller account from the product accounts means each SaaS service can have its own AWS account, which provides a good security and management boundary. When a seller has multiple products, multiple AWS accounts can be used to further separate environments across teams.

Using different AWS Marketplace seller and production accounts

In this scenario, there are 2 AWS accounts in play. The AWS account registered as an AWS Marketplace Seller (222222222222) and the AWS account where the production code resides (111111111111).

Best Architect_AWS_Marketplace_SaaS_Subscriptions

The Seller Account is registered with AWS Marketplace and does have permissions to call the Metering APIs. The seller account contains an IAM Role, with the appropriate IAM Policy to allow access to the Metering API as well as the permission for the role to be assumed from the Production Account.

The IAM Role in the Seller Account in our example is called productx-saas-role. This has the AWSMarketplaceMeteringFullAccess managed policy attached. The IAM Role has a trust relationship as shown below:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::111111111111:root"
      },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "sts:ExternalId": "someid"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

The SaaS application is hosted in the Production Account. This account is not authorized to call the Metering APIs. This account contains an IAM Role and Policy which is attached to the EC2 instances running the hosting application via an EC2 Instance Profile. This provides the instance with temporary credentials which can be used to sign requests to AWS API calls. These temporary credentials are used to call the sts:AssumeRole method, which returns temporary credentials from the seller account. These are used to call the Metering API.

The permissions required to perform the sts:AssumeRole command are:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": {
        "Effect": "Allow",
        "Action": "sts:AssumeRole",
        "Resource": "arn:aws:iam::222222222222:role/productx-saas-role"
    }
}

In order for the application to make a call to the Metering API, it must first assume the role in the seller account. This is done by calling the sts:AssumeRole method. If successful, this call returns temporary credentials (secret/access keys). These credentials can then be used to call the Metering API.

The following code snippet shows how you can call the assume_role function in python to obtain the temporary credentials from the seller account.

import boto3

sts_client = boto3.client('sts')

assumedRoleObject = sts_client.assume_role(
    RoleArn="arn:aws:iam::222222222222:role/productx-saas-role",
    RoleSessionName="AssumeRoleSession1",
    ExternalId="someid")

credentials = assumedRoleObject['Credentials']

client = boto3.client('marketplace-metering','us-east-1', 
    aws_access_key_id = credentials['AccessKeyId'], 
    aws_secret_access_key=credentials['SecretAccessKey'], 
    aws_session_token = credentials['SessionToken'])

Summary

Using a single AWS Account for AWS Marketplace avoids confusion and mistakes. Using cross-account roles allows you to avoid hosting production code in the AWS Account registered as a seller. For more information on SaaS Subscriptions, please visit the AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscriptions page.

Have You Read Our 2016 AWS Partner Solutions Architect Guest Posts?

In 2016, we hosted 38 guest posts from AWS Partner Solutions Architects (SAs), who work very closely with both Consulting and Technology Partners as they build solutions on AWS. As we kick off 2017, I want to take a look back at all of the fantastic content created by our SAs. A few key themes emerged throughout SA content in 2016, including a focus on building SaaS on AWS, DevOps and how to take advantage of particular AWS DevOps Competency Partner tools on AWS, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Networking, and AWS Quick Starts.

Partner SA Guest Posts

There’ll be plenty more to come from our SAs in 2017, and we want to hear from you. What topics would you like to see our SAs discuss on the APN Blog? What would be most helpful for you as you continue to take advantage of AWS and build your business? Tell us in the comments. We look forward to hearing from you!

 

Why Did Dynatrace Build a SaaS Solution on AWS?

Dynatrace is an Advanced APN Technology Partner, and holds the AWS Migration and DevOps Competencies. The company recently began offering its cloud application performance management service directly through AWS Marketplace, as a part of the recent AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscriptions launch.

We recently caught up with John Van Siclen, CEO of Dynatrace, and Alois Reitbauer, VP, Chief Technology Strategist of Dynatrace, to learn more about why they chose to build a SaaS solution on AWS, and the value of becoming an APN Partner. Take a look:

To learn more about Dynatrace, click here.