When installing our software, whether as a SaaS/PaaS or a bring-your-own-cloud, here's our checklist: 1. How will we provision the physical servers? 2. How will we install our Foo software on those servers? 3. How will we configure our Foo software to match different configuration requirements? (eg. listener configurations, etc) 4. How will we do monitoring and alerting? 5. How will we fix issues such as low disk space or a server crash? 6. How will we configure secure network access to the Foo service? 7. How will we integrate with the customer's TLS PKI and/or OAuth infrastructure? 8. How will we do upgrades for the Foo service? 9. How will we deploy new parts of the Foo ecosystem, for example if we add an admin UI? 10. How will we deploy the dependencies of the Foo service (database, etc)? We have really good answers to all 10 questions in Kubernetes (whether in our own cloud account, or a customer's cloud account). But along comes a prospect who says "our entire stack is on ECS" As of today, we have answers for a total of zero of those questions with ECS... Some questions for the fantastic experts here: 1. Is it feasible to go back to that prospect and say "give us an IAM role, let us create an EKS cluster in your account, and we will manage Foo as a service in that manner"? a. Specifically, how hard/dangerous is it to remotely manage an EKS cluster in a cloud account that we don't own? I would be much more comfortable with GKE...if only because GKE is much more mature 2. I'm worried that supporting ECS in addition to K8s would "double" the amount of questions we have to answer. (10 for K8s, 10 for ECS). Is that true? 3. Are there any other things you might add to the checklist?

@Colt McNealy supporting on prem sounds like you’d need to provide manage services as well 🤔 It is a path with its own pros and cons. I briefly checked your website though, looks like you’d be forced to work on your clients’ servers. Maybe there’s a path wherein you dont have to do that, but i dont know the space enough to make an educated guess 😅

I would stick to Kube and go the route of creating the cluster in their account; that’s a pretty well established pattern, so we’ll established that you can register yourself in the AWS Marketplace to provide it - that’s how you can get a dedicated Confluent cluster in your AWS account

That makes sense! I'm mostly just worried about whether EKS is mature enough to remotely manage...I've had some annoyances with it in the past

Hmm I’ll have to double check that, we’re trying to buy a dedicated cluster from them right now through the AWS Marketplace and it had been my impression that the cluster would live in our account, but maybe I’m wrong

Got it...we looked into AWS marketplace in the past (seems like it's a 2024 or 2025 problem for us), and they allow vendors to sell either: 1. Install in your cloud, generally through CloudFormation 2. Hook up billing to the vendor's cloud environmnet In option 2) the value-add of AWS Marketplace is a unified billing experience for the customer...not really anything other than that

I feel like you’d be fine for a while just running a terraform module against your customer’s AWS account