A template on the Exoscale marketplace is your software packaged in a QCOW2 virtual disk image including an operating system and additional software and data.

Templates are offered by the software editor itself or by template maintainers who take over the effort of creating, publishing, maintaining and supporting the respective template.

Templates on the Exoscale Marketplace are provided with an individual product page and can be provisioned via the Marketplace, the Exoscale portal and also via API. The infrastructure costs resulting from running those templates will be additionally billed to the End-User.

Roles and responsibilities for templates

There are different roles in the case of publishing a template on the Exoscale marketplace.

Exoscale

Exoscale is the IaaS provider, providing an organization to build your template. We take responsibility for a smooth onboarding, billing of your product and act as the first point of contact for support tickets from customers using your template. Furthermore, we provide documentation for creating templates and your product page. We advertise your templates to customers via our website and implement sales enablement activities to drive revenue. To support the software editor and maintainer, we provide a single point of contact and support.

Template maintainer

The template maintainer is the creator and maintainer of the virtual disk image for the software. The maintainer is the contracting party for Exoscale and signs the Exoscale Marketplace Framework Agreement. In this role, you are responsible for meeting all commercial and technical requirements and agree with the software editor on applicable license and billing models. Additionally, constant maintaining, updating and the lifecycle management for the template lies and aligning the marketplace content with the software editor lies in your full responsibility. In many cases, the software editor will also fulfill the maintainer role.

Software editor

The software editor is the manufacturer of the software. You provide the template maintainer with all the necessary rights and means to create a BYOL or PAYG template on Exoscale.

Purchase of templates

A customer can purchase (in case of PAYG model) or simply start your template (in case of BYOL) through the Marketplace product page, directly in the Exoscale console or via using our Exoscale API.

For PAYG templates the pricing structure or license types need to be clearly set out by you in the product page. Additionally, the End-User license agreement needs to be included and a disclaimer to notify the customer that by starting a template, the user agrees to these terms and conditions.

Screenshot

After clicking on “Get it now” on the product page of your template, the user is directed to the instance creation page in his Exoscale portal. Your template and the machine type of your choice is selected by default.

Onboarding process for reselling templates on the marketplace

Contracting Phases

  • (1) Contract – after contacting Exoscale to be listed as a vendor on the Marketplace and a first call, you will receive the framework agreement as the contractual basis for our cooperation. In the Special Product Terms for your product that is provided as a template, you will need to detail the pricing and billing model. After signing the contract, Exoscale will start configuring the metering and billing system based on the conditions in your Special Product Terms. (Note: As of now, there is an expected lead time for of about 3 weeks not impacting the following steps that you need to go through)

  • (2) Creating the image – the next step is to create your virtual disk image based on the technical requirements.

  • (3) Deploy and test on Exoscale – after creating the image you will need to deploy and test it in your own Exoscale organization. If you don’t have an Exoscale account yet, register your company as an Exoscale account via https://portal.exoscale.com/register. Afterwards create your template using the “custom template feature” in the Exoscale portal. You can find a detailed step by step documentation on creating custom templates here: https://handbooks.exo.io/templates/ Make sure to test your image properly before putting it into production. Marketplace vendors are granted monthly free credits of 500 CHF to support you in this process.

  • (4) Provide website content – to market and sell your product on the Exoscale marketplace, we will publish a product page. Together with the contract you will receive an Excel file that needs to be filled out by the template maintainer and giving all the information we need to set up the product page by you. After filling in the content (1 file per product), send it for review to your Exoscale SPOC.

  • (5) Confirm availability – when your template is ready to be launched, your website content is approved by the Exoscale SPOC and you want the image to be published in general availability for all Exoscale customers, send a request to support@exoscale.com.

The email should contain the following:

Exoscale support will send a notification once your template has been launched on the Marketplace and Exoscale portal.

Support

Offering support and the level of support available to your customers are completely under your discretion. This needs to be detailed in the Special Product Terms as part of the Exoscale Marketplace Framework Agreement and in the product page of your template. We advise vendors to at least provide a documentation on how to start the template to lower hurdles for users and drive usage.

If you offer customer support for your product, you will publish the contact details or landing page on the product page on the Marketplace. Exoscale offers its user supports via the Exoscale portal or support@exoscale.com. We will not support users with tickets concerning your product, but we will act as first point of contact and dispatch tickets, after excluding possible IaaS related issues, to your named support contact by adding your named support email address to our support ticket.

More about creating marketplace templates