Posted on by Steve Bar Yakov Gindi

1-Click Enterprise Deployments: Engineering Agent Provost for AWS Marketplace

I’ve seen this exact movie play out at three different tech companies:

Me: “I can handle our AWS Marketplace deployment. I’ve done it before.”

Management: “That’s fine, Sales will figure out the Marketplace stuff.”

Fast forward six months. The product never went live on the Marketplace until the company hit the layoff phase, and we parted ways.

Here is the brutal reality that most B2B SaaS companies refuse to accept: AWS Marketplace isn’t a sales problem. It’s a ruthlessly technical DevOps problem.

Most companies fail their Marketplace onboarding because they treat their AWS CloudFormation template as a cheap “wrapper” around their app, rather than treating the infrastructure as the core product itself. AWS Marketplace handles the billing and the listing, but the technical onboarding and security scanning are incredibly serious. If your syntax or permissions are off by an inch, AWS rejects your build.

When I built Agent Provost—my deterministic AI governance layer and circuit breaker for Alpaca trading—I knew I couldn’t cut corners. I engineered the infrastructure to be “Bank-Grade” from the very first line of YAML so that AWS would easily list it, and hedge funds could safely deploy it.

Here is what a real, 1-click enterprise deployment looks like under the hood.

1. Zero-Touch Secret Injection

When dealing with financial APIs like Alpaca, you cannot ask a user to manually SSH into a server and paste their API keys into a config file. It’s a massive security risk and a terrible user experience.

In the Agent Provost CloudFormation template, I used NoEcho: true parameters to pass the Alpaca API keys directly into a stack-specific AWS Secrets Manager resource. The AMI then securely consumes these secrets at boot time.

Parameters:
  AlpacaApiKey:
    Type: String
    Description: "Your Alpaca API Key ID"
    NoEcho: true
    MinLength: 5
  AlpacaApiSecret:
    Type: String
    Description: "Your Alpaca API Secret Key"
    NoEcho: true
    MinLength: 5

By using NoEcho, the keys are masked in the AWS Console and CloudFormation logs. The buyer never has to manually handle a config file, and the keys are never exposed in plain text.

2. Immutable Audit Trails for FINRA/SEC Compliance

Agent Provost acts as a hard circuit breaker between Large Language Models (LLMs) and the Alpaca trading API. If an AI hallucinates a rogue trade, Agent Provost blocks it. But blocking it isn’t enough—you have to prove it to the auditors.

To satisfy the most stringent FINRA and SEC audit requirements, I implemented ObjectLockConfiguration with GOVERNANCE mode on the S3 log bucket.

  TradeLogBucket:
    Type: AWS::S3::Bucket
    Properties:
      BucketName: !Sub "agent-provost-logs-${AWS::AccountId}-${AWS::Region}"
      ObjectLockEnabled: true
      ObjectLockConfiguration:
        ObjectLockEnabled: Enabled
        Rule:
          DefaultRetention:
            Mode: GOVERNANCE
            Days: 90

This block of YAML ensures that once a trade log is written to the bucket by Fluent Bit, it is physically impossible to delete or alter that log for 90 days. Not even an administrator can tamper with the AI’s trading history. This is the definition of bank-grade compliance.

3. Least-Privilege Runtime Environment

One of the fastest ways to get rejected by the AWS Marketplace review team is to give your EC2 instances wildcard Admin rights.

Agent Provost operates on a strict principle of least privilege. The EC2 instance running the AI governance engine is assigned a highly restricted InstanceRole.

  InstanceRole:
    Type: AWS::IAM::Role
    Properties:
      AssumeRolePolicyDocument:
        Version: "2012-10-17"
        Statement:
          - Effect: Allow
            Principal:
              Service: ec2.amazonaws.com
            Action: sts:AssumeRole
      Policies:
        - PolicyName: AgentProvostStrictPolicy
          PolicyDocument:
            Version: "2012-10-17"
            Statement:
              - Effect: Allow
                Action:
                  - secretsmanager:GetSecretValue
                Resource: !Ref AlpacaApiSecretResource
              - Effect: Allow
                Action:
                  - s3:PutObject
                Resource: !Sub "${TradeLogBucket.Arn}/*"

The instance can only do exactly two things: read its specific Alpaca secret from Secrets Manager, and write logs to its specific S3 bucket. If the instance is ever compromised, the blast radius is virtually zero.

The Result: Enterprise AI Governance in 10 Minutes

By engineering the infrastructure with this level of rigor, the result is seamless. A hedge fund’s IT team can deploy a hardened, compliant AI circuit breaker in under 10 minutes without opening a single support ticket.

Agent Provost is currently in private preview on the AWS Marketplace. If you are a quant fund or broker looking to safely deploy LLM-driven trading without risking capital loss or regulatory fines, contact me.

(P.S. I am also currently exploring new DevOps opportunities. If your engineering team needs someone who can bridge the gap between “it works on my machine” and “it’s ready for the AWS Marketplace,” let’s talk.)

Leave a Reply