Achieving 14 Times Return on Investment Using AWS Marketplace with Snyk

Founded in 2015 as a cloud-native company, Snyk offers a developer-first security solution that scans for vulnerabilities in code and provides actionable solutions. As the company grew, it realized it needed to modernize its infrastructure to support the ability of engineers to develop, scale, and deploy its offerings. “We wanted to build an infrastructure backbone where we could have multitenant regions around the globe,” says Crystal Hirschorn, Snyk’s senior director of infrastructure. “We asked ourselves, ‘What is the underlying cloud technology that we want to use?’ And that was AWS.”

Snyk created its security solution so that customers could simply incorporate security into their entire software development lifecycle. “When engineers do their day-to-day work, we make it frictionless to incorporate our security tools directly,” says Hirschorn. Snyk has a free version of the solution and a paid plan with advanced features. Because customers of Snyk and AWS have similar needs, Snyk wanted to offer its solution from AWS Marketplace, aligning to AWS processes so that procurement is familiar to users. In June 2020, Snyk engaged Tackle, an AWS Partner, to create listings and help Snyk get the most out of AWS Marketplace. With Tackle’s support and expertise, Snyk’s small team moved quickly to launch the first listing on AWS Marketplace by the third quarter of 2020. In 2020, Snyk also joined the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, which connects independent software vendors with the AWS Sales organization to provide software solutions that run on or integrate with AWS.

To keep up with its sales, Snyk had built a scalable, repeatable internal development platform called Polaris, which runs on AWS, by January 2021. “We built it in just under a year, which was probably faster than any other platform I’ve ever built before,” says Hirschorn. Polaris runs on 20–30 Kubernetes clusters using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed service to run Kubernetes on AWS and on-premises data centers. The infrastructure has scaled to support an engineering team that nearly tripled in size in 12 months as the company expanded from one to three AWS Regions. In fact, Snyk can set up its infrastructure in a new Region in about 2–3 days, a process that previously took a full year. “We want other developers in our company not to focus on infrastructure,” says Hirschorn. “We want to provide that so that they can do more important work, like actually building the products of Snyk.”

Since joining the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, Snyk has worked alongside AWS teams from the moment a lead is generated to when a sale is closed. By selling alongside AWS, Snyk has increased sales, reached larger customers, and reduced sales time and effort. In some cases, Snyk reduced the sales life cycle by 50 percent, accelerating the time to value for customers. “Our entire go-to-market life cycle follows the AWS process, which helps us gain 14 times return on our marketing investments around AWS,” says David Lugo, lead partner marketing manager at Snyk.

Snyk had two private offers in the first quarter of using AWS Marketplace. Over 2 years, Snyk has rapidly grown, closing the fourth quarter in 2022 with 81 private offers—its largest number of sales yet. “By coordinating alongside teams at AWS to identify and solve customer needs together, we’ve been able to scale our organization and give our startup organization more credibility,” says Matt Koehler, alliance director at Snyk.

Snyk’s solution helps developers across the entire software delivery lifecycle. Because Snyk’s solution works seamlessly alongside AWS services, customers save time and reduce complexity. For example, customers’ developers can run Snyk’s solution directly from the AWS Management Console (which provides everything needed to access and manage the AWS Cloud) while building code using AWS CodePipeline, a fully managed continuous delivery service for automating release pipelines.

In the fall of 2022, Snyk began to increase its focus on cost savings and cost management. Working alongside its AWS technical account manager, the company saved about $2.5 million in 6 months by streamlining its infrastructure on AWS and elsewhere throughout the company.

By 2024, Snyk hopes to have satisfied the requirements for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which is a US government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. “FedRAMP is a real stamp of approval to enterprise customers that we are enterprise-ready out of the box,” Hirschorn says. “We will be able to turn this into part of our product offering on the single-tenant side for Snyk Private Cloud. That strikes a business benefit for external customers and solves an internal need for us as well.”

Snyk plans to continue to invest in AWS solutions to enhance the customer experience. For example, the company continues to expand its solution globally across additional AWS Regions, and it will offer a self-service option from AWS Marketplace. “Because we’ve aligned our solution with the experience of using AWS, it’s easier for our joint customers and prospects,” says Rebecca Spataro, director of global alliances at Snyk. “It makes us better together.”