Selling a serverless solution through AWS Marketplace

Question

Hello, 
We are running a completely serverless solution using Lambdas and Step Functions. The solution facilitates Data Intelligence and is in production. Our solution is designed to support multi tenancy. But we are struggling to sell our solution to customers due to their requirements on data privacy. Our customer wants to retain all of their data in their own cloud (aws account). For this, we are exploring different options on AWS marketplace. We want our solution to be deployed in buyer's AWS account through marketplace. Apparently, this is not supported under SaaS category. We have also looked into the CloudFormation delivery option, but seems like this option is bound to work with AMI based products. 
At this point we need guidance, whether or not our use case is supported through AWS marketplace ?

Thanks in Advance !

Answer

Hi,

We have similar perspective in the dev of AWS services: we try to keep customer data in customer account for obvious security / confidentiality.
 reasons.

In that case, cross-account data access is a possible way to go: you access customer data in customer account from your solution account(s) via cross-account access services offered by many AWS services.

Of course, in that case, the customer has to trust the fact that you will not escape in your account some of the data that you access for the application purpose.

Another way that you can think of are Nitro enclaves aimed (among others) to protect IP of some solution provider when running in an account out of its control: see https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/nitro-enclaves/. But, this may create too much work because Nitro enclaves work on EC2 instances only . So, you would have to run your Lambdas under the control of something like OpenFaas https://www.openfaas.com/ and encapsulate it in EC2 instead of Step Functions.

Best,

Didier

Answer

Usama,

Were you able to work out a solution?  We're about embark on a similar 100% serverless approach and it looks like the AMI (although EC2 isn't needed) is the only way to include additional services via CloudFormation.  Many thanks in advance; I'll be sure to report back with any findings we discover.

Selling a serverless solution through AWS Marketplace

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