AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

Public references are commonly noted as one of the top APN elements that AWS customers look to when selecting an APN Partner. Customers can view validated public references within your AWS Partner Solutions Finder listing under the “Case Studies” tab, and they use these public references to review an organization’s previous success delivering AWS workloads. References not only enhance your visibility with customers, they can prepare your organization to apply for APN Programs such as the AWS Competency Program.

To receive the AWS Competency designation, APN Partners must undergo rigorous technical validation and assessment of the security, performance, and reliability of their AWS solutions. To help APN Consulting Partners better understand this process and our validation requirements, we are releasing new versions of the AWS Competency Validation Checklists. The checklists highlighted in this post are for APN Consulting Partners, who in many cases undergo technical validation through ISSI, a third-party auditor.

As part of the onboarding process when joining the AWS Service Delivery Program, APN Partners must go through a technical audit of their experience delivering AWS services to end customers. This audit is conducted by internal technical experts who validate the APN Partner’s knowledge and capabilities for a specific AWS service. To help APN Partners better understand this process, we are introducing Validation Checklists that provide visibility into the criteria we use during an organization’s technical validation.

Heirloom PaaS automatically refactors mainframe applications’ code, data, job control definitions, user interfaces, and security rules to a cloud-native platform on AWS. Using an industry-standard TPC-C benchmark, we demonstrated the elasticity of Heirloom PaaS on AWS, delivering 1,018 transactions per second—equivalent to the processing capacity of a large mainframe. Heirloom Computing is an APN Standard Technology Partner.

The AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam has been updated to reflect the latest services and best practices related to the AWS Developer role. Though there are no prerequisites, we recommend candidates have one or more years of hands-on experience designing and maintaining an AWS-based application and an understanding of AWS services and architectural best practices. We have also released an updated exam guide to help prepare you for the new exam.

VMware Cloud on AWS is now available in the AWS Europe (Frankfurt) Region. VMware, an APN Advanced Technology Partner, has been working with AWS to release new enterprise capabilities for VMware Cloud on AWS every 90 days. In addition to the continued global expansion, new capabilities are being introduced to increase enterprise readiness and make it easier for customers to start adopting. VMware Cloud on AWS is now GDPR-ready and we have introduced major compliance certifications.

Throughout the month of June, we are highlighting best practices designed to help APN Partners maintain tier compliance. We’re calling this series “Achieve the Green” because our goal is to help you get green check marks throughout your Partner Scorecard Review. To kick off our series, we focus here on the Partner Scorecard view that is accessible in APN Partner Central. This is an integral tool for tracking and managing your APN tier status and to view eligibility requirements for upgrading to the next level.

The AWS Service Broker is an open source project that allows native AWS services to be exposed directly through application platforms, such as Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Developers are able to provision and expose AWS through the Service Catalog, CLI, or API without needing to interact with the AWS console, or without having extensive knowledge of AWS. In response to customer feedback, we have added new features to AWS Service Broker for OpenShift and Kubernetes.

SignalFx is an APN Advanced Technology Partner with the AWS DevOps Competency that provides AWS customers with a real-time monitoring solution supporting every stage of the cloud journey. SignalFx offers a consistent, comprehensive view of your elastic, distributed environment; noise-free, actionable alerts on all classes of metrics powered by real-time analytics; and the operational intelligence—including workload and usage patterns—to run your digital applications as a business.

A number of APN Consulting Partners have told us they would like to have access to a repository of solution blueprints that address common business patterns. To meet this need, AWS Service Catalog is now providing easy access to common and foundational AWS-based solutions and reference architectures in GitHub. There are currently five blueprints from AWS solutions architects on GitHub, and we plan to establish a formal process for APN Consulting Partners to submit reference architectures.

We are excited to announce that APN Marketing Central is now available in Simplified Chinese. If you are an APN Partner in China, or a global APN Partner with a presence in China, the assets available in APN Marketing Central can help you go-to-market with approved messaging from AWS. We have launched two new campaigns in Simplified Chinese—Big Data and Cloud Migration. APN Marketing Central is a benefit for all Standard-tier and above APN Partners and is available at no additional cost via Partner Central.