Amazon Machine Learning and Amazon Elastic File System: A Perspective for APN Partners

At the Amazon Web Services (AWS) San Francisco Summit, we announced two new AWS services: Amazon Machine Learning and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS).

To learn more about the specifics of each new offering, check out the AWS Blog announcements: Amazon Machine Learning and Amazon EFS. Below, we discuss some of the ways that you might think about how you can utilize these new services to build your business on AWS.

Amazon Machine Learning

Build Smarter Applications with Amazon Machine Learning, a Predictive Analytics Service

Amazon Machine Learning is a service that makes it easy for developers to add predictive analysis to their applications by providing visualization tools, wizards, and a set of APIs that simplify the process of creating machine learning (ML) models. With Amazon Machine Learning, APN Partners who provide (or want to provide) predictive analysis for their customers can quickly add real-time predictive capabilities to their applications instead of spending time managing complex ML code and infrastructure.

Applications such as demand forecasting, fraud detection, and systems monitoring often apply rule sets and static algorithms to raw data to help end customers answer questions or make decisions. How much inventory should I buy? Am I being hacked? Is my database about to go down? With the availability of a pay-as-you-go ML service that scales to billions of real-time predictions, you may be able to add breadth or depth to the analysis your applications already provide.

How Might APN Partners Utilize Amazon Machine Learning?

If you have software that consumes data and presents decision-oriented analysis to your customer, could Amazon Machine Learning augment your application’s predictive capabilities? For example, if you build systems monitoring software, could ML help determine when to send an alert? If you build security software, could ML improve predictive threat detection?

If developing a predictive analytics offering is on your roadmap, can Amazon Machine Learning speed your time to market? Could you apply ML internally? How might your developers utilize Amazon Machine Learning to analyze internal development cycles or infrastructure spend?

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)

High Availability, Shared, Easy-to-Use File Storage for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Applications

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a scalable, highly-available, shared file storage service. With Amazon EFS, applications running on multiple Amazon EC2 instances can access a file system at the same time. Amazon EFS supports the NFSv4 protocol and is designed for a wide variety of Network Attached Storage (NAS) use cases like content repositories, development environments, and home directories. With on-demand scaling and performance, Amazon EFS is an ideal solution for Big Data applications.

How Might APN Partners Utilize Amazon EFS?

For Managed Services Providers (MSPs), can you leverage Amazon EFS integration with AWS IAM, Amazon CloudTrail, and AWS tagging service to offer new platform tools for your customers

If your consulting practice implements software that requires shared storage, can you leverage EFS to expand your practice to the cloud? Are your customers using expensive NAS hardware and facing support or licensing renewals that could be avoided by using EFS?