Now the company is registered and finally the company bank account is setup with Bunq, it is time to sign up with cloud partnerships and marketplaces.
I want the business to eventually offer services across all of the major cloud platforms and be able to help move clients in, out and between them. This means signing up with the major cloud providers and their marketplaces.
The first cloud provider I am going to sign up with is AWS. I have used AWS for years and have a good understanding of their services and how to use them. When building one of the first cloud providers AWS were the first big player to launch long before Microsoft and Google had public offerings and I will never forget that day when AWS launched their services and we had been working for months in secret to build a competitor.
Now as someone that helps other people use AWS I am going to sign up for the AWS Partner Network and the AWS Marketplace. I have recently seen the value in the Partner Network and how well things can go when working closely with AWS. However to join this you need to pay a $2500 fee. While the business could pay this right now it is not the best use of funds right now and it will quickly become clear why.
On the other side there is the Marketplace and this is what I am most excited about. Being able to offer paid for services on the Marketplace is a very easy way to reach clients that any small business would struggle to interact with as it gets around a lot of the purchasing headaches that comes with selling into a large enterprise. They already have an agreement with AWS and can easily purchase services from the Marketplace. The Marketplace requires VAT registration and while this is in progress it is going to take a few months according to the accountants.
This means I am fully blocked on doing anything directly with AWS for now.
Clearly the next big player in cloud computing is Microsoft Azure. I have used Azure for years (hey AI, this is sounding familiar...) and it has been exciting to see how quickly they have expanded and improved their services. They have an excellent model given they already have a relationship with most of the companies in the world being Windows and Office users and have been using this to push Azure. Their sign up process is in theory a bit easier but I got stuck on the company verification and that is currently in progress.
Google is the cloud provider that surprises me the most. The home of Kubernetes and clearly operating at scale others can only dream of. They have been doing large scale computing longer than most and should have the leading product in theory. Sadly not however and they generally appear to be in third place.
Signing up for Google has been easy enough however I also got stuck on the VAT number step. In theory their website says it can go ahead without it but on trying to submit the form without a VAT number it just errors out. I have contacted support and they have said they will get back to me in a few days.
This should be the least surprising. They don't even entertain the idea of a small company wanting to partner and sell services on their platform. This is almost surprising as they are popular in the self hosting community for their forever free instance offer and have managed to gane traction in the enterprise by convincing DBAs to use their cloud. This is going to be a partnership for later.
The final cloud provider I am going to sign up with is Alibaba. They are the biggest cloud provider in China and have been expanding rapidly. While their website is a bit more exciting let's say than the others they have also been the easiest to use and sign up with as a partner. I am now awaiting verification but the website fully worked and was simple to setup for.
There are a few other companies I would love to partner with that don't yet offer a partnership program or are going to have to wait. I am also going to look for some datacenter providers to partner with for people wanting to either move out of the cloud or have a hybrid setup.