Jira Service Desk & AWS: Partners in One Good Crime

[#1]

As a Solution Partners and Marketplace Vendors, we always have to carry the burden of providing our customers with excellent products, outstanding support, and innovations at scale. It may sound like a software utopia but, in most cases, is just a quest for a more creative and less manual solution of an existing impediment. 

Recently, Botron started the development of its Partner Program. The purpose of this program is to allow other Marketplace Vendors to quickly reach various marketing, sales, and training materials about our apps. One significant and highly desired program feature is requesting a Demo Environment.

What partners want? 

A quick and easy way to test, use, and present our products without the fear of breaking or deleting sensitive configuration.

What do we want?

An automated solution and less human interaction whenever we have a demo environment request. 

Plus, we needed various types of demo environments for ourselves.

What was the best solution to our use cases (except the smartest IT Guy)?

Thanks to AWS, we skipped the invention of the wheel. Their app AWS Service Management Connector for JSD turned out to be the perfect fit. Let me guide you through the flow of our fully automated solution that helps people test and try different apps and services without fear of breaking anything.

1. After logging to the Service Desk, the user should navigate to the Demo request.

2. After selecting the AWS menu, the user will be presented with a pre-filled form containing all information regarding the future demo environments, e.g., Name, Parameters, Time to Live. No actions are required but to press Create.

3. The user's request is now live, and a minute later will receive an automatic update with URL, User, and Password to the active Demo instance. Voila.

What happens in the background?

To provision and configure portfolios and products, we use the AWS CloudFormation templates, which are JSON– or YAML- formatted text files.  These templates describe the resources that we want to provide to our users. From there, we are moving through the well-documented tutorial of creating a Portfolio → Product → Template & Adding a Template constraint. We can customize each instance by our preference and allow users to browse listings of products (services or applications) that they have access to, locate the product that they want to use, and launch it all on their own as a provisioned product.

It works like a charm. 

This simple integration significantly raised our productivity and allowed us to sleep well with knowing that we can support our partners and colleagues at any time and in no time. 

From a Real Support to a Real Support: AWS, you guys rock! 😎

[Boyan Batchvarov]

It does work like a charm : ) The IT guys made ours and their lives easier! It's great to have a demo environment in a few minutes without bothering anyone...

[Deleted user]

Hi everyone.

This is very nice, we'll put this to a test run!

But, I have a doubt:

With this integration, could I use it to open, follow and close Support Cases in AWS, from my Jira Service Desk issues page, without the needing to open another browse tab with AWS Support central?

[Teodora V _Fun Inc_]

Hey @[deleted], thanks for your feedback!

In our case, the integrations work specifically for the automated provision of test environments when the user opens a service desk request. 

I think you should check the AWS Connector Documentation page if the integration will cover your use case. :) (or submit them a support request, I am sure that they will help you with information right away!)