Tag Archives: EKS

MARKETPLACE: AN EXCLUSIVE AZURE & AWS SHOPPING CENTER – PART II

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When you take a look to AWS, you can smell the origin of their public cloud strategy and why you can buy thirty-party technology solutions such as Palo Alto Firewalls, Linux Red Hat or SUSE VMs with lots of applications, or even Cisco or other network providers products. As you know, marketplaces are nothing else than platforms which enable transactions between customers and thirty party sellers.

Jim Collins identified the term “flywheel effect” and explained the concept to Jeff Bezos who saw an incredible opportunity where other people would have seen just a methodology without options to survive.

The idea is simple. Create a virtuous cycle that increases the number of sellers who offer their products and services, which therefore, increase the amount of offers and prices of those products or services so it´s more interesting to the users in order to find exactly what they want with the right prices.

Hence, improves the traffic to the platform and drives more sellers and customers to buy there. Moreover, you reduce prices to users, and they are used to visit your platform or marketplace from time to time.

From Amazon to AWS (Amazon Web Service) Marketplace

AWS marketplace was the first cloud marketplace for Hyperscalers – AWS started the journey to sell thirty party IT products and services following in the footsteps of Amazon platform.

Customers can buy thousands of ISV products and services to deploy with agility and just for testing or find out if a specific software make sense and fill the gap in their company.

There is flexibility of prices, offer terms and conditions. There are pricing plans with an annual approach for 12 months subscriptions or even for just one month if you need for example to roll out a POC. there are others such as usage pricing where customers just pay for what they use in a PAYG approach or pricing models for specific product delivery methods such as containers or ML.

It is very flexible as you can buy even professional services product prices which are in general offerings of professional services packages. All the offers can be tailored for your target company if you are an AWS partner, and you can access to public or even private offers if you are a customer to leverage better discounts or improve some aspects of the ISV product or the consultancy company you deal with.

Lots of solutions are waiting for you…

You can make plans for some offer types publicly available or available to only a specific (private) audience. Likewise Azure marketplace we have explained in the previous post and follow up the same marketplace strategy as AWS did.

In summary, if you are figuring out which value can bring an ISV to your business on the cloud, and you want to leverage some AWS partner professional services in a specific area as cybersecurity or SAP, if a chance you should not forget.

Enjoy the journey to the cloud with me…see you then in the next post.

MARKETPLACE: AN EXCLUSIVE AZURE & AWS SHOPPING CENTER

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When you, as a user, access your Azure Portal or AWS portal, you have the option to buy thousands of products or solutions preconfigure for you. You don´t need to worry for the licences or the IT capabilities to design or deploy an specific solution as there are all build following customer needs for several AWS or Microsoft partners and ISV (independent software vendors).

We will speak about the AWS marketplace later, in a new post. Just to pointed out, it was launched in 2012 to accommodate and foster the growth of AWS services from third-party providers that have built their own solutions on top of the Amazon Web Services platform such as ISV, SI (System Integrator) an resellers so the customer would buy exactly what they needed and when they needed adding a tremendous flexibility to grow their cloud solutions aligned with the business.

In the case of Azure was launched in 2014, it is a starting point for go-to-market IT software applications and services built by industry-leading technology companies.The commercial marketplace is available in 141 regions, on a per-plan basis.

What are the plans and how to use them (as a Partner)?

Microsoft partners can publish interesting solutions which involve licenses and services together within the Azure Marketplace – On one hand, you don´t need to acquire licenses which prices are prorated within the price. On the other hand, you have access to expertise without hiring new employees in you IT team.

A plan defines an offer’s scope and limits, and the associated pricing when applicable. For example, depending on the offer type, you can select regional markets and choose whether a plan is visible to the public or only to a private audience. Some offer types support an scope of subscriptions, some support price related to consumption, and some let a customer purchase the offer with a license (BYOL), they have purchased directly from the publisher. 

Offer typePlans with pricing optionsPlans without pricing optionsPrivate audience option
Azure managed application✔✔
Azure solution template✔✔
Azure container✔ (BYOL)
IoT Edge module✔
Managed service✔ (BYOL)✔
Software as a service✔✔
Azure virtual machine✔✔
  • Markets: Every plan must be available in at least one market. You have the option to select only “Tax Remitted” countries, in which Microsoft remits sales and use tax on your behalf.
  • Pricing: Pricing models only apply to plans for Azure managed application, SaaS, and Azure virtual machine offers. An offer can have only one pricing model. For example, a SaaS offer cannot have one plan that’s flat rate and another plan that’s per user.
  • Plan visibility: Depending on the offer type, you can define a private audience or hide the offer or plan from Azure Marketplace.

How to publish and what kind of visibility can we provide (As a Partner)?

You can make plans for some offer types publicly available or available to only a specific (private) audience. Offers with private plans will be published to the Azure portal.

You can configure a single offer type in different ways to enable different publishing options, listing option, provisioning, or pricing. The publishing option and configuration of the offer type also align to the offer eligibility and technical requirements.

Be sure to review the online store and offer type eligibility requirements and the technical publishing requirements before creating your offer.

To publish your offers to Azure Marketplace, you need to have a commercial marketplace account in Partner Center and ensure your account is enrolled in the commercial marketplace program.

Also if your offer is published with a private plan, you can update the audience or choose to make the plan available to everyone. After a plan is published as visible to everyone, it must remain visible to everyone and cannot be configured as a private plan again.

Finally, as a partner can enable a free trial on plans for transactable Azure virtual machine and SaaS offers.

For example, azure virtual machine plans allow for 1, 3, or 6-month free trials. When a customer selects a free trial, we collect their billing information, but we don’t start billing the customer until the trial is converted to a paid subscription.

What are your benefits when using Azure Marketplace (As a User)?

Marketplace brings flexibility to customers as they can buy immediately any kind of offer based in a plan which provide several products from thousands of ISV without losing time to deal with any vendor or understand in detail the support model or licensing options.

In the Azure portal, select + Create a resource or search for “marketplace”. Then, browse the categories on the left side or use the search bar, which includes a filter function and choose what you need..

Likewise, there are lots of consultancy services provided from several Microsoft partners, some of them as a free trial so you can test the quality of their professional services and see their approach to fix your pain points.

Enjoy the journey to the cloud with me…see you then in the next post.

KUBERNETES ON THE CLOUD – WHAT TO EXPECT FROM AZURE & AWS

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It sounds quite familiar when we have pointed out some functionalities inside Kubernetes as a service on the cloud comparing with others on premise kubernetes solutions. But landing with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2016, K8S came to the scene with open source solutions as Red Hat OpenShift and Suse Rancher. Therefore as you can imagine, Kubernetes doesn’t take that long on the cloud.

To be honest, EKS started on 5th june 2018 and AKS was launched by Microsoft 24th October 2017 . Here we have the AWS EKS current timeline release calendar.

And here, Microsoft approach, AKS timeline release calendar as well.

Upgrade Kubernetes on Azure & AWS

No surprise related to upgrading version for both cloud kubernetes solution – On one hand, with reference to Azure, when you upgrade a supported AKS cluster, Kubernetes minor versions cannot be skipped. On the other hand, because Amazon EKS runs a highly available control plane, you can update only one minor version at a time. Therefore even on the cloud magic doesn´t exist. But also, we have some bad news for the lazy boys.

Related to AKS cluster version allowed, Microsoft says: “If a cluster has been out of support for more than three (3) minor versions and has been found to carry security risks, Azure proactively contacts you to upgrade your cluster. If you do not take further action, Azure reserves the right to automatically upgrade your cluster on your behalf“. So watch out, if you are a lazy boy, as Microsoft can do the job for you :-).

But, what happens to the lazy boys on AWS?. Yes, you knew it. Good guess: ” If any clusters in your account are running the version nearing the end of support, Amazon EKS sends out a notice through the AWS Health Dashboard approximately 12 months after the Kubernetes version was released on Amazon EKS. The notice includes the end of support date.“. Adding to that: “On the end of support date, you can no longer create new Amazon EKS clusters with the unsupported version. Existing control planes are automatically updated by Amazon EKS to the earliest supported version through a gradual deployment process after the end of support date. After the automatic control plane update, make sure to manually update cluster add-ons and Amazon EC2 nodes“.

Moreover, take into account your API versions, if they are deprecated you are in trouble. Please, follow this guide to solve the issue asap.

Quotas, Limits and Regions

Regarding service quotas, limits and regions maybe you can draw a line in the sand to know what makes sense for you and your applications. Each hyperscalers have its own capabilities in terms of scalability and resilience. Let´s take a look to this..

MICROSOFT AZURE

AKS offers a strong solutions for your applications…

In terms of region availability, all we´ll be smooth and cheerful if you don´t have to work in China. In this case, if you don´t want to get struggle on this, just verify which region has AKS ready to be roll out.

AWS

Here you can see the EKS approach..

Related to regions, please regarding China ask directly to AWS. In the case of Africa, there isn´t still EKS deployed at the time of writing this post.

To summarize, AWS runs Kubernetes control plane instances across multiple availability zones. It automatically replaces unhealthy nodes and provides scalability and security to applications. It has capabilities for 3,000 nodes for each cluster, but you have to pay for the control plane apart. AWS is more conservative to facilitate kubernetes cluster new versions and maintain the oldest more time.

Meanwhile, Microsoft AKS, just about 1000 nodes per cluster, use to be faster than AWS to provide newer kubernetes versions, can repair unhealthy nodes automatically, and support native GitOps strategies, and integrates azure monitor metrics. Control plane has two flavours depending on your needs, free tier and paid tier.

SECURITY

EKS can encrypt its storage persistent data with a service called AWS KMS which as many know it´s very flexible using customer keys or AWS keys. In the case of AKS use Azure Storage Service Encryption (SSE) by default that encrypts data at rest.

Finally, AKS can take advantages of Azure policies as well as Calico policies.

Anyway, AWS EKS also supports Calico. I hope this article can somehow clarify your vision as a cloud architect, tech guy or just CIO who wants to know where to migrate & refactor their monolith on premise solutions.

Enjoy the journey to the cloud with me…see you then in the next post.