AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

For AWS Marketplace and our customers, 2018 was a big year. We had some exciting announcements at AWS re:Invent 2018, where we launched new categories for container products and machine learning. With 30+ new features launched in 2018 for AWS Marketplace, we wanted to highlight the top ones for you, including AWS Marketplace for Machine Learning and Containers, Consulting Partner Private Offers, Enterprise Contract for AWS Marketplace, Flexible Payment Scheduler, and more.

APN Premier Partner nClouds helps customers build and manage modern infrastructure solutions that deliver innovation faster. They have been conducting AWS Well-Architected Reviews since getting certified as an AWS Well-Architected Partner in January 2018. In this post, we explore the basics of Well-Architected and the value of a Well-Architected Review, as well as how this framework can support your business. You will find AWS Well-Architected essential to achieving a customer-first culture.

With AWS, you access to an unprecedented breadth of product functionality that can enable your business in new and exciting ways. APN Partners have the unique challenge of not only enabling their customers to grow their businesses, but also managing accounts, resources, and costs at scale. When it comes to costs, AWS provides a number of products out of the box that can help customers get started managing costs and usage. This includes AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and the AWS Cost & Usage Reports.

In this post, we describe best practices and introduce the AWS Landing Zone solution that automates landing zone deployment and configuration. It all starts with a multi-account structure with security and governance controls and network settings. Based on customer business requirements, the initial AWS Landing Zone environment can be scaled up through capabilities like the Account Vending Machine functionality, Landing Zone Add-Ons, and automated resource baselining.

We are excited to highlight 23 APN Partners that received new designations in December for our global AWS Competency, AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP), and AWS Service Delivery programs. These designations span workload, solution, and industry, and help customers identify specialized APN Partners that can deliver on core business objectives. Please join us in welcoming our newest APN Partner designees!

Digital banking has evolved significantly over the past decade, completely transforming the financial marketplace. It has become commonplace for banking customers to use mobile apps and online portals for many banking needs. Because of this digital transformation, banks have more data than ever. Vertical Trail’s Financial Data Hub gives banks the ability to obtain reliable insights from their data and convert them into transformative action.

Data is at the nucleus of informed decision-making. For many organizations, however, there are complicated processes that come into play before data can serve its true purpose. The Alteryx Platform is a self-service data science and analytics platform that enables organizations to take full advantage of their data and analytics assets through a drag-and-drop interface that is both code-free and code-friendly. The end-to-end platform empowers users to break data barriers and deliver business-critical insights faster.

Metaphactory is a graph data management platform that helps you build knowledge graphs and smart applications. It makes authoring, curating, editing, linking, searching, and visualizing graph data easy, fast, and affordable. Amazon Neptune supports open-source and open-standard API operations and allows you to use existing information resources to build your knowledge graphs and host them on a fully managed service.

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.