EagleDream’s Involvement in AWS Well-Architected Partner Program Helps Customers Optimize Cloud Computing Capabilities

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Well-Architected Partner EagleDream helps its customers migrate to the AWS Cloud and review their current architectures to increase efficiencies and reduce costs. By performing dozens of Well-Architected Reviews each year and offering a series of TechTalks by APN Ambassadors, EagleDream has established a reputation as an expert in AWS Cloud computing. EagleDream expanded its customer base as a Well-Architected Partner that’s knowledgeable in architecting workloads on the cloud, application modernization, data engineering, data lake designs, and analytics.

EagleDream Technologies (EagleDream), an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, is a tech-consulting firm that empowers companies who use cloud computing on AWS to optimize their performance. Founded in 2013 and based in Rochester, New York, EagleDream has extensive experience architecting workloads on the cloud, as well as a full suite of skills in application modernization, data engineering, data lake design, and analytics. The team has built a variety of applications for their customers on AWS, and that has inspired a company mantra: “Things are just an API away.”

EagleDream’s cloud-first mindset and commitment to delivering high-performing service and value to its customers made it an ideal candidate for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN), and the consulting firm has found success helping companies build, market, and sell AWS solutions by providing valuable business, technical, and marketing support. EagleDream deepened its expertise when it became a launch partner in the AWS Well-Architected Partner Program, which is designed to provide the resources partners need to help AWS customers establish good architectural habits, eliminate risk, and respond faster to changes that affect designs, applications, and workloads.

EagleDream’s first foray into application development was helping a healthcare data analytics startup called EagleDream Health—which was purchased by NextGen Healthcare in August 2017—create a cloud-native software app in 2014. Early on, EagleDream showed proficiency using AWS services for app modernization, full-stack cloud-native transformation, and enterprise-level user interface and user experience (UI/UX) design. EagleDream joined the AWS Partner Network in 2015 and quickly ascended to the Premier tier of APN Partners.

“AWS services are like a box of building blocks somebody placed on the table,” says Scott Weber, Vice President of Cloud Solutions at EagleDream. “And your customer is trying to solve different problems by joining these AWS services. But how do you do it in the right way? That’s where the AWS Well-Architected Review provides the guideposts. Companies will know: Is it cost effective? Is it secure? Can I operate it and know what its state is?”

The AWS Well-Architected Framework was developed to help cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications. Having participated in a Well-Architected Review of its own operations, EagleDream jumped at the chance for AWS Well-Architected Partner Program certification when the program debuted in 2018. As one of the debut members of the AWS Well-Architected Partner Program, EagleDream takes its certification seriously, requiring all new employees to become AWS Certified Cloud Practitioners within 2 months and to attain Associate-level status within 6 months, Weber notes. “Earning certification from AWS is not a trivial thing. It sets guidelines to help us navigate with our customers—everything from looking at the architecture itself to ways we can save costs right now.”

Being AWS Well-Architected Partner Program certified has enabled EagleDream to vastly expand its customer portfolio, including leading migration and development projects for golf expert PGA of America, leading alcohol beverage producer Constellation Brands, cell tower analysis company 5x5 Technologies, and others. In the past year alone, EagleDream has completed 36 Well-Architected Reviews. “It’s a nice way for us to get to know our customer,” says Weber of the Review process. “We’re big believers in earning our way to a customer. An AWS Well-Architected Review is our opportunity to show overall value for the customer, with no strings attached.”

Education is critically important to EagleDream, and the company has discovered that the core concepts of Well-Architected Reviews are worth sharing far and wide. In 2020, the company debuted a series of “TechTalks events” featuring EagleDream employees and its customers, all sharing knowledge about AWS Cloud computing. “The goal is to bring local technology communities together for a conversation around innovation, digital transformation, and how they can advance their businesses,” Weber says.

Another way EagleDream expresses its commitment to cloud education is through its participation in the APN Ambassador Program, a community of technical experts in the APN Consulting Partner community. With three APN Ambassadors on staff, the company can give current and potential customers the chance to engage one-on-one with experts regarding AWS Cloud computing through their “Ask an AWS Ambassador: Ask Me Anything Hours.” “They’re really casual, open conversations, 45 minutes to an hour, on different topics,” says EagleDream Marketing Manager Courtney Willison. “We welcome people to bring a challenge they have or if they want us to review their architecture. It gives them an open opportunity to have that conversation with an AWS expert.”

EagleDream also sponsors APN Immersion Days in various cities such as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, New York; and Jacksonville, Florida. During these immersive training days, EagleDream’s experts consult with local companies to answer questions about everything from architecting data lakes to setting up serverless storage in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). “So maybe a company is running its compute in Heroku and all its storage is in AWS,” Weber explains. “And the company wants to see what it would look like to move out of Heroku and into Amazon S3 and containerize its applications. During an APN Immersion Day, that company would bring us this idea, and we could project that it would save about 40 percent if we do this migration.”

Such savings demonstrate the immediate benefits that AWS Well-Architected Partner Program certification yields for EagleDream’s customers, but there are long-term benefits too. For example, EagleDream helped a commercial roofing company create an app that allowed it to take measurements directly from photos. “The team was building out this whole backend that would bridge between Salesforce and an on-premises Oracle system,” Weber explains. “And it was doing it in a serverless manner using AWS Lambda and other AWS services. So throughout that Well-Architected Review, we advised the team to look at moving to a serverless application model to help its deployment.”

Well-Architected Reviews also help EagleDream provide its customers with airtight security. Weber notes that close to 80 percent of Reviews usually find security issues. One customer, for example, had weak patching in place and didn’t have a good rollback plan if something went wrong. The customer delayed fixing the issue and then called a week later when the patch blew up. “‘The servers aren’t healthy,’ they said,” recalls Weber. “We were able to help them troubleshoot rapidly and get them up and running again.”

For another customer, EagleDream radically increased the performance and efficiency of its databases by migrating to Amazon Aurora, a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud. “We did remediation with some team members from the company, but they ran with it and did the whole migration to Aurora,” Weber says. “They came back to us and said, ‘We can’t believe the difference here!’ They went from never being able to get below 10,000 items in the queue to never seeing more than 500 items in those queues. We gave that customer a lot more scalability and performance—and its database costs were cut in half.”