AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

We are excited to announce two new training opportunities for APN Partners—Amazon Desktop and Application Streaming for Technical and Business Professionals. These courses are intended for Partners who work with desktop applications hosted on AWS. They are delivered through a mix of web-based training and demonstrations of product features and functionality, and includes an assessment to validate what was covered.

The AWS Competency Program admitted 10 new and 9 renewed APN Partners in February—spanning workload, solution, and industry designations. The AWS Competency Program provides customers with highlighted APN Partners that have demonstrated technical proficiency through an AWS Technical Validation and proven customer success in specialized solution areas. Please join us in welcoming our newest AWS Competency Partners.

AWS Marketplace released more than a dozen major features in 2017, as well as many other enhancements and updates. These releases make it easier for AWS customers to discover and procure software, and for ISVs to sell their products on AWS Marketplace, which currently offers more than 4,200 software listings from nearly 1,300 ISVs spanning 35 categories. In case you missed any announcements, here’s a recap of new features that are relevant to ISVs and AWS Partners.

While modernizing customer mainframes, the team at AWS Blu Age discovered that Batch can be a complex aspect of a mainframe migration to AWS. It’s critical to design your AWS architecture to account for the key Batch stringent performance requirements such as intensive I/Os, large datasets, and short durations. Let’s explore how to migrate mainframe Batch to AWS microservices using AWS Blu Age automated transformation technology.

AWS Partner Cinegy has long been an advocate of IP-based video workflows and understands that maintaining visual quality whilst reducing bandwidth consumption is an ongoing challenge with the increasing data requirements of formats such as Ultra High Definition (UHD). In this post, Cinegy demonstrates how to deploy a fully-functional playout engine using Amazon EC2 resources and the Cinegy Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to deliver a UHD TV channel with graphics.

This is the third post in our series documenting a project to fix issues with the AWS GameDay architecture by using tenets of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. In Part 2, we remediated the critical findings found in our initial review and here we’ll cover remediating the deficiencies found in our Disaster Recovery plan, as well as other optimizations we’ve made due to recent announcements. We will also discuss how to address another crucial component in our application development—testing.

Blockchain-based applications introduce new possibilities for both peer-to-peer and enterprise optimization solutions. AWS is investing in blockchain through our partner community, and BlockApps is a leading provider of Ethereum blockchain development solutions. Their private implementation, written in Haskell, provides a highly scalable Ethereum-compliant blockchain with an industry standard RESTful API and an easy-to-use web-based management dashboard.

A challenge many industrial and manufacturing corporations face when adopting IoT is the complexity of designing and developing for embedded devices. This is even more pronounced for corporations that have little knowledge of firmware development for embedded devices. Zerynth, an APN Select Technology Partner, provides a software development suite that enables Python programming on 32-bit microcontrollers and allows easy connectivity to AWS IoT service.

Amazon Athena is a Presto-distributed SQL engine used to query unstructured data using standard SQL, where you pay only for the amount of data you query. Chartio, an AWS Competency Partner, recently announced support for Athena. Their solution allows you to query and visualize data stored in an Amazon S3 data lake using standard SQL. You can also use their visual drag-and-drop SQL layer, which generates native SQL queries for you.

The AWS Training and Certification team is hosting a beta for an updated version of our AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam. This beta reflects current AWS features, services, and best practices. You may take the beta exam through March 16. Space is limited and registration will close when capacity is reached. We are offering the beta exam for $75 USD—a 50 percent discount off the cost of the standard Developer exam.