AWS Marketplace allows you to sell software to AWS customers. The customer can either run the software on its own (using AMIs and optional CloudFormation), or you can offer the software as a service (SaaS). You can also offer containers and machine learning algorithms in the AWS Marketplace.

In this episode, you will learn how to sell pay per use SaaS in the AWS Marketplace. I will show you the overall process and finish with code snippets to implement the process.

AWS released a new feature called EC2 Instance Connect. Unfortunately, the defaults are insecure. You likely can open an SSH connection to every EC2 instance in your AWS account now.

AWS releases a new service with a lot of marketing noise. You can’t resist, you want to use that new thing now. But soon you discover that the service is missing essential features. As a result, you stumble upon a show stopper and get frustrated. Why is that? AWS ships new services with a lot of limitations and rough edges. That’s a good strategy for AWS to get early feedback. But it’s painful for us, the customer.

Therefore, we start a little series where we review new AWS services to give you a more balanced view of the capabilities. We start with AWS Backup.

AWS Backup aims to become a centralized place for managing backups. If possible, AWS Backup uses existing features to create backups (e.g., RDS snapshots). Sometimes, AWS Backup is the only way to create a backup (e.g., EFS file systems).