AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

AWS GameDay is a learning exercise designed to familiarize players with an AWS environment, and challenge them to come up with ways to solve problems based on the AWS resources they have available. GameDay has been a showcase event for APN Partners and customers in the Americas, but we wanted to provide this immersive experience to folks working in India as well. At Cognizant’s event, teams used AWS services to track down the absconding CEO of a fictitious unicorn rental company.

With the 2018 release of Amazon OpenSearch Service integration with Amazon Cognito, you can now enable corporate users to access OpenSearch with Kibana using your corporate directory credentials through identity federation. In this post, we share a step-by-step integration of Active Directory (AD) and Amazon Cognito. With Amazon Cognito User Pool, you can extend your directory so AD users are able to log in to Kibana with the same security credentials.

When you are migrating private applications to AWS, how your users and administrators will access them needs to be considered. VPNs do not provide the granular control desired by a Zero Trust approach, as users have access to any resource on the network and not just specific resources they are granted access to. Learn how you can implement a Zero Trust approach to access applications hosted on AWS using Zscaler Private Access (ZPA).

Deloitte’s Gary Arora, an APN Ambassador, will show you how to integrate an application with Amazon Athena to execute SQL queries with ‘athena-express.’ This is a wrapper around the AWS SDK that can simplify executing SQL queries in Amazon Athena and fetch the JSON results in the same synchronous call—a capability well suited for many web applications. Developers can use ‘athena-express’ to help save time and effort in setting up the integration and focus on core application development.

As teams begin to build their architecture on AWS, the question often arises about how to manage access control to all of their instances. Userify solves this problem quickly and easily by providing Userify Cloud or, for self-hosting, a single instance or multi-Availability Zone cluster that runs in your Amazon VPC. Userify Cloud is a fully managed service that can be used across your VPCs and AWS accounts with no installation needed.

Companies still rely on mission-critical applications running on Sun SPARC, Alpha, or other legacy systems like PDP, VAX, or HP 3000. Maintenance costs for these systems goes up as time goes on, and reliability declines due to their age. Fortunately, they can be re-hosted on AWS in a matter of days using cross-platform hypervisors from Stromasys. Here, we describe the challenges customers face with legacy systems, the Stromasys technical solution, and a successful customer migration to AWS.

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark on AWS Quick Start helps you to make securing and monitoring resources easier to implement and understand. The Quick Start was developed by Accenture, an APN Premier Partner and Managed Service Provider (MSP) with the AWS Security Competency. We also created a new video offering step-by-step best practice guidance on how to deploy the CIS Benchmark Quick Start and build foundational security capabilities into your account, in just 10 minutes.

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (AWS Managed Microsoft AD) makes it possible for you to monitor and analyze security events of your directory in near real-time. In this post, we show you an example of how to detect and respond to unauthorized or unusual activity. We’ll also explore how to monitor and create near-real-time alerts for account lockouts in your AWS Managed Microsoft AD using Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Splunk.

At AWS re:Invent 2018, we announced updates to APN Tier requirements, as well as access to updated benefits for APN Partners. We are moving the launch of new 2019 APN Program requirements to April 1, 2019. This additional time will allow us to provide you with the best possible partner experience leading to the best possible long-term results. Please engage your partner development contact with any additional questions you might have at this time.

Customers who are architecting for data center extension, disaster recovery, or building hybrid environments can use AWS Direct Connect to achieve the private connectivity to their VMware Cloud on AWS Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). The new SDDCs backed by NSX-T networking provides full routing support for infrastructure (underlay) and overlay networks over a single Virtual Private Interface. AWS Direct Connect provides connection speeds of 1Gbps and 10Gbps.