AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

We are excited to introduce AWS SaaS Factory to help accelerate and guide the adoption of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model on AWS. The program offers a comprehensive set of business and technical best practices, as well as engagement opportunities that empower and support ISVs building SaaS offerings on AWS. The focus is on helping customers and APN Partners at all stages of the SaaS on AWS journey.

The AWS Competency Program admitted 41 new APN Partners in May—spanning workload, solution, and industry designations. The AWS Competency Program helps customers identify and choose top APN Partners that have demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success in specialized solution areas. This validation gives customers complete confidence in choosing APN Partner solutions from the tens of thousands in the AWS Partner Network.

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.

We are excited to announce the launch of seven Exam Readiness Courses to help you prepare for AWS Certification. These courses complement our technical training courses and focus on helping you to validate your technical expertise. We’ll teach you how to interpret exam questions, apply concepts being tested by the exam, and allocate your study time. You’ll also have a chance to work through sample questions to understand the rationale behind correct and incorrect answer choices.

We are excited to announce an expansion of the AWS Public Sector Contract Center. The new AWS Public Sector Contract Center includes a broader set of APN Partner contract vehicles and related information that can be used by public sector organizations to procure AWS services. We’ve also expanded the Contract Center’s focus by going global—the page now includes contract vehicles for international public sector organizations.

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.