Building Your Open Source Commercial Strategy with AWS

By: Serge Shevchenko, Manager, Startup Partner Development – AWS

The path from popular open source project to profitable business is one of the most challenging journeys in technology today. While proprietary software companies can commercialize their code, open source founders must master a delicate balance: maintaining the growth, trust and engagement of their community while building sustainable commercial offerings. This may include new methods of deployment through intelligent agents while utilizing the commercial offerings as primitives.

At a recent AWS panel, open source leaders who have successfully navigated this challenge, including Solomon Hykes (Docker, Dagger), Tristan Handy (dbt Labs), Erica Brescia (Redpoint Ventures), and Serge Shevchenko (AWS) shared their experiences and revealed that success requires carefully crafted strategies unique to each project. This blog will provide a framework for creating commercial strategy with AWS that can lead to a profitable business. Let’s start by exploring why open source is needed in today’s business environment.

Why Open Source in Today’s Business Environment?

Some of the most transformative technologies powering today’s digital economy are open source. According to the 2024 State of Open Source Report, 95% of enterprises use open source software today, with 33% increasing their usage. That’s why AWS participates in over 50 open source foundations and contributes extensively to important projects such as Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Jupyter, Rust, and Valkey. Some of AWS’s most popular services like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK), are built on or integrate deeply with open source technologies. Open source offers flexibility through its fundamental attributes – it’s customizable, produces higher quality code through community reviews, eliminates vendor lock-in, and helps with talent recruitment. These characteristics make it particularly well-suited for enterprise adoption, especially as companies seek more flexible, transparent solutions for their technology stack.

While open source software provides value through community driven innovation and transparency, there is a gap between free software and enterprise-ready solutions. This gap creates an opportunity for startups to add value through managed services, agentic capabilities, or both. Let’s explore how AWS can help open source solutions become enterprise-ready by making them simpler, more stable, and secure.

Making Open Source Projects Simpler, Stable and more Secure

Open source projects offer a variety of commercialization paths such as support services, enterprise features, consulting, and managed services. This blog focuses specifically on a combination of managed services and AI agents. One of the biggest misconceptions of open source software is that free software means free solution. Any powerful and complex software, open source or not, requires knowledge and expertise to implement successfully. How do you get someone to pay for software that is freely available? Create solutions that make using that software simpler, stable and more secure.

Today, open source projects predominately use managed services for commercialization. Setting up a single instance of an open source relational database can be straightforward. However, configuring that same database to be highly available through replication across geographic regions, including backup and upgrades, is much more complex and requires specialized knowledge. AWS addressed that issue through its Amazon RDS, a managed service that provides that specialized knowledge as a service, minimizing administrative overhead so that users can focus on their core business, not their database.

With the introduction of Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (in preview), these managed services can now become building blocks for AI agents. AgentCore Gateway transforms how managed services are utilized by providing a secure interface layer for AI agents to interact with these services. The Gateway converts APIs and services into Model Context Protocol (MCP)-compatible tools that agents can discover and access. For example, while an AI agent cannot directly manage database operations, it can use Gateway-enabled tools to execute authorized actions. Through semantic tool selection, agents can identify and compose the most appropriate services for specific tasks from available authorized tools. This evolution from purely human-operated managed services to agent-assisted operations represents an emerging opportunity in open source commercialization, enabling startups to enhance their service capabilities while maintaining security and control. Let’s expand on commercializing the managed service in the next section.

Building a Managed Open Source Service (MOSS)

As you build a managed service to provide simplicity, stability and security to users of your open source project, AWS is ready to help through the AWS Global Startup Program (GSP), which is a program within the AWS Partner Network (APN). Historically, the GSP has worked with open source startups such as dbt Labs, Astronomer, Sysdig, Cribl, and more through their commercialization journey. We’ve developed specialized resources and expertise to help projects make this crucial transition, supporting startups through two critical phases: joint product development to build enterprise-ready offerings and comprehensive go-to-market support to reach both commercial practitioners and executive decision makers within the AWS customer base. The GSP provides guidance through the Foundational Technical Review (FTR) and AWS Well-Architected reviews. AWS solutions architects evaluate your architecture to ensure your managed offering scales reliably while preserving your open source project’s strengths. The program supports transforming solutions into agent-based AI offerings through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore for enterprise grade deployment, and Strands Agents for flexible open source development. This combination enables startups to build secure, AI agents that enhance their managed services, from rapid prototyping to production ready solutions, using the AWS API Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server for seamless integration.

We provide dedicated Technical Account Managers and Partner Solution Architects who connect you directly with AWS service teams. This link to AWS engineering enables valuable customer feedback to inform your product roadmap. For more complex integrations and projects, we can bring in AWS Professional Services or connect you with our network of Consulting Partners. AWS can fund these engagements, reducing your financial burden as you build out your commercial offering. Lastly, we provide access to technical differentiation programs like AWS Competency and AWS Service Ready to validate your integration with AWS services, making it easier for enterprise customers to adopt your solution with confidence. Now, let’s discuss how you can accelerate your path to success in the next section.

Accelerating Go-to-Market Success

Now that you have a MOSS, how do you get people to learn about it, and more importantly, buy it?

For many open source founders, transitioning focus from community growth to enterprise sales represents a considerable shift. Enterprise sales cycles can be complex and lengthy, involving numerous stakeholders, security reviews, and procurement processes. We provide resources for comprehensive go-to-market support. Starting with community growth and enablement, we help amplify your community presence through joint developer marketing. Technical education is crucial for developer adoption, so we help create and deliver hands-on workshops through the AWS Workshop Studio. This technical content geared towards your Open Source Service (OSS) users can potentially reach thousands of developers, helping them convert from OSS to a paid managed service or agentic offering. To streamline the conversion process from OSS to managed service or AI agent, AWS Marketplace can be integrated with joint workshops. This enables open source projects to create a variety of revenue streams through both managed services and intelligent agents.

These workshops can be impactful. Isaac Harris, VP of Business Development at Pulumi, notes:

For a top down enterprise executive sales acceleration, we have programs like APN Customer Engagements (ACE) and AWS ISV Accelerate that maximize the output of joint marketing activities. These programs incentivize AWS sales teams to collaborate with you on shared customer opportunities through the AWS Marketplace.

The Power of Partnership

Adding a commercial business around your open source project is complex, but you don’t have to figure it out alone. The AWS Global Startup Program provides resources to help you navigate this journey, combining deep technical expertise with extensive go-to-market capabilities, and funding. We maintain deep alignment through regular business reviews, executive briefings, and joint planning sessions with AWS teams.

Webb Brown, Founder and CEO at Kubecost, shared his experience:

Get Started

Whether you’re building traditional managed services or exploring the new frontier of AI agents for your open source projects, AWS provides the tools, infrastructure, and go-to-market support to help you succeed.

Ready to learn more about how AWS can support your business journey? Contact your AWS Startup account manager for further details, or review the GSP Onboarding Roadmap to get started. Together, we can help transform your open source success into a thriving enterprise without losing the community spirit that made your project special in the first place. The path from passionate project to profitable product isn’t always straightforward but with the right partner, it’s a journey you can navigate with confidence.