New – AWS Marketplace Support for Clusters and AWS Resources

AWS Marketplace is an online store that helps you to find, buy, and immediately start using a very wide variety of applications on AWS (some of the more popular categories are Network Infrastructure, Security, and Big Data).

Up until now, running an application from AWS Marketplace was essentially equivalent to launching a single, self-contained Amazon EC2 instance. This was a good starting point, but it was not sufficient to deal with more sophisticated applications that run across a cluster of instances and/or require additional AWS resources such as Auto Scaling groups, Elastic Load Balancers, SQL database instances, an advanced network configuration, message queues, and so forth.

Support for Clusters and AWS Resources
To address this customer need, an application in the AWS Marketplace can now be represented by up to three AWS CloudFormation templates, each created by the application vendor, and each with a distinct set of deployment options. Before you actually launch a template-backed product, you will see a list of the AWS resources that will be created, along with an estimate of the monthly costs. Vendors also have the option to provide the traditional AMI-powered option alongside the new and more powerful template-powered options.

Initial Application Support
We have been working with a group of application vendors to make their applications available in this new and more flexible fashion. Here’s what you can launch today:

• Sophos –Sophos UTM 9 Autoscaling.
• Tibco – Jaspersoft for AWS with Multi-Tenancy (Hourly).
• NetApp – OnCommand Cloud Manager on Linux.
• MapR – Enterprise Database Edition Plus.

We’ll be adding more applications in the very near future.

As you can see from this screen shot, the deployment options are clearly visible, as is the estimated cost:

Template Power!
Because this new option makes use of CloudFormation, sophisticated users have access to some interesting new features. The launch process makes use of the CloudFormation console and supports the usual prompting for parameters and generation of multiple output values. Templates can be downloaded, inspected, and even edited in the CloudFormation Designer that we launched earlier this year.

Note to Application Vendors
If you are already selling your products on the AWS Marketplace and would like to take advantage of this new option, contact your AWS BDM (Business Development Manager) or contact the AWS Marketplace team. If you are new to AWS Marketplace, start by reading our Sell on Marketplace page.

— Jeff;