This document introduces the basic mechanism of how customer's SaaS instance be managed on Alibaba Cloud Marketplace. After reading this document, ISV may have a better understanding of what to do before access and publish SaaS product on marketplace to provide a better service together with marketplace to customer.
1.Instantiated SaaS
First of all, please make sure your SaaS is an instantiated service model, which means you start an independent internal service to each new purchase order no matter whether the order is purchased by a same customer. Under this condition, Alibaba Cloud Marketplace could manage customers' instance with your system together.
2.Access method on marketplace
There are 3 access methods on marketplace, they are 'Compute Nest', 'License' and 'SPI'.
Compute Nest: Compute Nest is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that establishes a channel between you and your SaaS customers. After customer purchase a SaaS, Compute Nest automatically deploys the software in a secure and efficient manner. This simplifies your operations to deploy the software and ensures the user experience between your customer and you in each touchpoint.
License: The license mode applies to SaaS products that must be activated by customers themselves at the official websites of the SaaS products after purchase. After customer purchases your SaaS product, marketplace generates a license to customer. When customer activates this license on your website, you need to get the detail purchase information by check the license via marketplace interface, verify and activate the service.
SPI: The SPI (Service Provider Interface) mode applies to SaaS products that are immediately activated after customers purchase them. After your SaaS product is purchased(or renewed, expired, released), marketplace send SPI notification to your endpoint so that you can adjust your service status, which means in this mode, you need to access to marketplace SPI.
Please think about what kind of access method you want to choose before you start publish your SaaS product to marketplace. For most of ISV in general scenario, we recommend the SPI mode. If you have special or complex requirements, please don't hesitate to contact our BD or SA.
3.Instance life cycle
No matter what kind of access method you choose, the mechanism of instance life cycle is the same.
There are 4 key actions in an SaaS instance life cycle, they are 'create', 'renew', 'expire' and 'release'. Marketplace helps ISV managing customer's instance life cycle so that ISV only need to focus on the SaaS service.
After customer purchase a new order of your SaaS product, the instance will be created in marketplace system.
After customer renew an instance, the expire date in marketplace system will be updated to the new expire date.
When the instance is expired, marketplace send notification to ISV, and ISV decide whether allow customer to continue use the service.
When the instance is released, marketplace send notification to ISV, and ISV decide whether to delete the service.
4.SKU and Pricing
Marketplace strongly recommend ISV publish SaaS service as a single product, which not only helps customer understand your SaaS better but also convenient for both of you and marketplace to manage the service instance.
For example, if your SaaS service have several versions, such as 'basic', 'advanced', 'premium', and each of them has several optional modules, you need to publish this SaaS as a single product with three versions (SKU), and each version has different price and optional 'Extra Billing Items' corresponding to the optional modules, so that customer could buy the appropriate version with optional modules they like. In this way, there is only one service instance in both marketplace system and your system. Otherwise, there will be so many instances.
For more information about publish SaaS product, please refer to the link below.
https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/marketplace/latest/overview-of-publishing-saas-products