During Re:invent 2018, AWS Marketplace announced the launch of AWS Marketplace for Containers. AWS Marketplace for Containers allows customers to find, subscribe to, and deploy container applications in Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon ECS-Anywhere (Amazon ECS-A), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and AWS Fargate. Throughout this time, the AWS Marketplace team have been enhancing the customer experience, and today, we are excited to announce the launch of AWS Marketplace QuickLaunch for Amazon EKS for public preview. This is an enhancement that simplifies the container deployment experience for our customers using Helm charts.

Helm is a common way for sellers to package all the Kubernetes properties in a single YAML file. Many Independent Software Vendors (sellers) choose to package their application with Helm charts because it offers the end customer an easier way to deploy Kubernetes applications. The customer, however, still must launch new Kubernetes clusters and perform prerequisite configurations to install the Helm chart. This step slowed customers down. Wanting to provide the customer with the best user experience, the AWS Marketplace team created a new, end-to-end, automated deployment method that would spin up new EKS clusters and deploy the application using Helm.

The new customer experience

With this feature in public beta, customers can visit AWS Marketplace and subscribe to one of two applications that support the Helm experience, Kubecost and Isovalent’s Cilium. Once subscribed, you proceed to the launch page, where you choose the Launch button to be redirected to an AWS CloudFormation template. Once the template is accepted and executed, it spins up a new Amazon EKS cluster and installs the application in the new EKS cluster using the seller-provided Helm charts.

Now, the average time to complete the deployment is 60 minutes, subject to change depending on the container product you selected. This is an improvement over the hours customers had to spend to research the deployment instructions, spin up the EKS clusters, configure the clusters with the prerequisites, and install the application.  The deployment process is also delivered automatically and consistently via infrastructure as code using AWS CloudFormation templates, thus eliminating any inconsistency between deployments.

The enhancement is currently in public beta with Kubecost and Isovalent, Inc.  You can find and try out the new launch experience with these applications in AWS Marketplace today. If you are interested in this enhancement and want to learn more, you can contact us at aws-mp-helm-questions@amazon.com

Getting started

You can find the links to the AWS Marketplace containers products currently supporting this enhancement at the end of this blog post. Here’s how to get started:

1. Go to the container product of your choice listed in Launch partners. Select the product you want to use. On the Product Details page, you see more product details, such as the Product Overview, Pricing Information, Usage Information, and Support Information. To start the subscription process, choose the Continue to Subscribe button.
2. On the Subscribe page, review the Terms and Conditions of the product. To accept the product subscription, choose Accept Terms. This process can take up to two minutes to complete.
3. Choose Continue to Configuration.
4. On the Configuration page, choose the box under Delivery method and select the Quick Launch (beta) as your delivery or deployment method. The following screenshot shows the Configure this software page with the Delivery Method of Quick Launch (beta) – Example Product selected.

5. Choose Continue to Launch. On the Launch page, you have the option to deploy a container application on a new Amazon EKS cluster. To do so, under Choose Action, use the drop-down menu to choose The following screenshot shows the launch page with EKS selected under Choose Action.

6. In the lower right, choose Launch. This redirects you to the AWS CloudFormation Create Stack page. Choose Next. On the Specify stack details page, enter a stack name and the required stack parameters. I entered a stack name of Example. For the other values of fields under Parameter section, I use default values prefilled by the stack. The following screenshot shows those inputs.

7. At the bottom of the page, select the checkbox next to I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names and the one next to I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might require the following capability: CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND. To start the container application deployment process, choose Create stack. Multiple CloudFormation stacks will be created automatically as part of the process. You can monitor the progress in the AWS CloudFormation console.

Launch partners

This enhancement on AWS Marketplace has been enabled for variety of our launch partner’s products. You can now take advantage of this enhancement to quickly try and deploy these following AWS Marketplace containers products:

Kubecost helps organizations manage the cost of Kubernetes clusters across AWS and other infrastructure environments. Kubecost enables customers to gain immediate cost visibility, optimization insights, and governance to detect unexpected spending increases or performance bottlenecks. Product: Kubecost

	Linh Lam is a Senior Partner Solution Architect, ISV focusing on AWS Marketplace and is passionate about application modernization, serverless, and containers technology. Outside of work, he enjoys hiking, camping, and building his home audio systems.
	Omar Chehab is a Senior Product Manager for AWS Marketplace. Omar leads the containers initiatives on AWS Marketplace, focused on growing the business, adding sellers, and simplifying the experience for customers. When he is not writing or creating, Omar spends his time with his wife, two kids, his reef tank, and his cat.