AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

VMworld 2018 US is the industry’s premier digital infrastructure event, and we put together a Know Before You Go Guide that highlights all of the activities happening that are related to VMware Cloud on AWS. This service has experienced a huge amount of interest since being announced at last year’s VMworld. Be sure to register for the VMworld Keynote on Monday, Aug. 27 at 9 a.m. PDT and hear from VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and AWS CEO Andy Jassy.

Based on high demand from our APN Partners, we are excited to introduce the AWS Navigate Program, which provides a prescriptive path for APN Partners to build a specialized practice on AWS. It offers APN Partners the guidance to become AWS experts and deploy innovative solutions on behalf of AWS customers. We have AWS Navigate tracks for Migration, Blockchain, Machine Learning, Contact Center, Microsoft Workloads, End User Computing, and Financial Services, with more coming later this year.

In this post, the first in an APN Blog series about Amazon FreeRTOS development for AWS IoT Core, we go through the setup required for running the Amazon FreeRTOS application, how it works on a high level, and how to connect it to AWS IoT Core. We will also present Percepio Tracealyzer, a tool for debugging the real-time behavior of Amazon FreeRTOS applications, together with a real-world example where Tracealyzer was used to analyze a connectivity issue I encountered when getting started with this project.

We launched new APN Badges in 2017 to help APN Partners highlight their partnership with AWS. These badges, in turn, help AWS customers identify and choose APN Partners by clearly showcasing the subject matter expertise offered by individual companies. As you start to explore opportunities with our APN Partners, take special note of the APN Program designations they have listed on their APN Badge.

Carlos Martell is a DevOps Engineer at Cloudreach, an APN Premier Consulting Partner. Carlos got his first AWS Certification in February 2017, and over the next year challenged himself to obtain all AWS Certifications. Learn about Carlos’s journey and benefit from his tips and tricks for becoming AWS Certified. He also shares best practices for preparing and studying for the exams, as well as how to approach exam day itself.

Now more than ever, nonprofits are using IT to reduce costs and maximize operational efficiency. We are excited to announce the new AWS Nonprofit Competency Program, highlighting our top APN Partners that have built solutions on AWS that support the unique missions of the nonprofits they serve. With the help of AWS Nonprofit Competency Partners, AWS customers can quickly, cost-effiectively, and securely leverage technology to scale mission impact and drive social change.

To give you an idea how AWS Nonprofit Competency Partners are driving social change, learn about the work of APN Partners ClearScale and Civis Analytics. APN Premier Partner ClearScale helped SF Match eliminate single points of failure and provide quality, high availability service to their users. Civis partnered with Robin Hood Foundation to model SNAP and EITC participation rates for every New York City community district.

There is no one-size-fits-all for mainframe modernization to AWS. Depending on the business and IT strategy, customers select the most suitable pattern for them. If the mainframe is large enough to process multiple workloads, the characteristics can favor different patterns. Fortunately, based on our experience from successful customer modernization projects to AWS, we have identified patterns, lessons learned, and best practices that facilitate new mainframe-to-AWS initiatives.

Liberating data from enterprise silos poses an uphill challenge for most IT organizations. The process usually involves backup of production databases, lift-and-shift migration to a cloud environment, provisioning of cloud resources, and validation of imported data. By utilizing AWS to maintain and manage the unified data fabric, Delphix Dynamic Data Platform accelerates cloud adoption and is a cornerstone during an organization’s migration to cloud-native and hybrid cloud deployments.

While many aspects of app development and deployment on AWS have been streamlined, authentication of end-users into apps remains challenging. In this post, Centrify highlights a new method of authenticating users into your mobile and web applications using the Application Load Balancer feature of Elastic Load Balancing using Centrify as an OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity provider. Centrify is an APN Advanced Technology Partner.

Kubernetes is an open-source platform to automate deploying, scaling, and operating application containers. But in itself, Kubernetes is not enough to achieve this goal. To fully empower our engineers, we need to build a CI/CD pipeline around Kubernetes. Using this tutorial from APN Partner Slalom Consulting, we have built a Kubernetes cluster with a good set of security defaults and then wrapped a simple CI/CD pipeline around it.