AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

We are always looking into how we can help you build your business on AWS. Today, we are excited to launch APN Marketing Central which provides tools and resources that enable you to generate demand for your solutions on AWS.

As a benefit for Standard tier and above APN Partners, APN Marketing Central provides you access to self-service marketing campaigns that allow you to quickly co-brand and launch solution-based campaigns or engage participating agencies for select marketing services.

APN Marketing Central replaces our former marketing tools, AWS Grid and AWS Syndicated Marketing, while providing all new campaigns and features like finding marketing and creative agencies to create your own campaigns.

Execute Campaigns

With APN Marketing Central, launch co-branded campaigns designed to get your message out to customers. Find customizable assets all ready for immediate use.

With every campaign, you’ll find the following assets that are ready to customize and launch on your own:

• Landing Pages
• Nurture Emails
• Social Media Posts & Images
• Syndicated Content
• Banner Ads
• Solution Briefs
• Copy Blocks

Find an Agency

Search for marketing and creative agencies in your region that can help you professionally develop your messaging, graphics, and overall collateral. Request a quote from one of the participating agencies through APN Marketing Central.

Find participating agencies who are offering the following marketing services:

• Telesales
• Case Studies
• Webinars
• Live Events
• Strategy

Manage Leads

Keep tabs on how your campaigns are working for you. Analyze your marketing campaigns with the built-in reporting to find the hottest leads in your contact lists.

Get Started

APN Marketing Central is a new benefit available to Standard tier and above APN Partners. Access APN Marketing Central with your APN Portal login via the Marketing tab in the APN Portal.

Step 1:

Access APN Marketing Central in the Marketing tab of the APN Portal

Step 2:

Set up your first campaign or find an agency to help you execute

Step 3:

Track your campaign effectiveness and follow up on your leads

To learn more about APN Marketing Central, visit the APN Marketing Central Overview page or register for one of our upcoming webinar trainings.

That’s a wrap on the 2016 AWS Partner Summit – Sydney! The ANZ Partner team organized a great event for APN Partners, and I was thrilled to get to be a part of it. The event featured guest speakers from AWS, APN member firms, and AWS customer firms. What follows is a short recap of the day:

AWS Partner Keynote

The event kicked off with a keynote hosted by Stefan Jansen, Head of ANZ Channels and Alliances, AWS, and Terry Wise, VP of Channels & Alliances, AWS. Both Stefan and Terry spoke to the importance of putting the customer first, and working together to drive customer success. Terry then discussed what we find to be some of the keys to partner success, along with seven key trends that represent an enormous opportunity for partners on AWS:

1. Cloud Migrations
2. Cloud Managed Services
3. DevOps
4. Big Data 
5. Internet of Things (IoT)
6. AWS for Windows
7. Embrace New Software Delivery Models 

The keynote featured guest speakers from firms OFX, Datacom, and Versent.

Also highlighted in the keynote was the investment AWS is making in the APN, Consulting and Technology Partner collaboration, and the 2016 APN Cloud Warriors for Australia & New Zealand. APN Cloud Warriors are AWS Certified individuals who are both deeply skilled on the AWS platform, and are strong technology advocates. Congratulations to all recognized!

Breakout Sessions

Nine breakout sessions were held across a wide range of topics, and featured a number of guest speakers:

• Building a Thriving Consulting Services Business with AWS
• Realising the Benefits of Cloud: Cloud Migration & Cloud Adoption Framework
• Expanding your Cloud Business with AWS Marketplace
• Helping Large Organisations Transform Their Business Using AWS 
• Monetising the AWS Cloud: Leveraging APN Programs, Training, and Support
• Selling with AWS – Understanding how to leverage the AWS Sales Methodology and Partner Best Practices
• Microsoft Workloads on AWS: Best Practices and Patterns for Architecture, Migrations, and Licensing
• Partner Managed Services on AWS 
• Building a Big Data Practice on AWS

AWS Partner Recognition

The ANZ team chose to recognize four APN Partners in four different categories: AWS Rising Star Partner, Most Innovative AWS Partner, Consulting Partner of the Year, and Technology Partner of the Year. Congratulations to the following APN Partners!

• AWS Rising Star Partner – API Talent
• Most Innovative AWS Partner – Comunet Pty Ltd
• Consulting Partner of the Year – DiUS Computing
• Technology Partner of the Year – TechnologyOne

Networking

AWS Partner Summits are a fantastic place for APN Partners to meet both AWS team members, and other APN Partners who may offer services and/or solutions on AWS that complement their existing offerings. Needless to say, there was no shortage of networking at the end of the AWS Partner Summit in Sydney. Did you have the opportunity to connect with other partners while at the AWS Partner Summit – Sydney? Tell us about it in the comments section.

More Information

Did you miss the event? We live tweeted the day from @AWS_Partners – follow us and take a look back at all of the action!

By Nick Matthews, Partner Solutions Architect, CCIE #23560

In the previous post on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), we covered the basic anatomy of a VPC and the different ways to connect a VPC to the outside world. In this post, we’ll explain advanced VPC concepts in a way that we hope you’ll be able to relate to as a network engineer.

Creating a New VPC

Let’s build a VPC from scratch. There are detailed instructions here. Briefly, here are the steps:

1. Create a new VPC. When configuring the VPC, choose a CIDR range within the RFC 1918 addresses that won’t overlap with on-premises addresses or existing VPCs.
   • If there’s an overlap, you might need to look at doing a one-way or two-way Network Address Translation (NAT). You might want to consider NAT options on the AWS Marketplace to assist with this, such as solutions from Check Point, Cisco, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, and Sophos.
2. Determine your subnet segmentation strategy, keeping in mind the number of Availability Zones (2+), network ACLs, what type of routing is required, and how workloads will be divided (dev/prod, by team, by security level, etc.). To start, group subnets as either private or public, and group by security requirements. The goal is to have enough subnets for availability that are large enough to handle growth, but not so large that it’s difficult to create non-overlapping subnets with the rest of your address space. Remember that “private” and “public” are just descriptions for subnets―they are the same components but just configured differently, and they can be changed later.
3. Determine your subnet sizing strategy, keeping in mind growth and elasticity of services, how large the VPC is, the five addresses the VPC uses in each subnet, and addresses for services, including Elastic Load Balancing. Remember that there are no broadcasts, so broadcast storms aren’t relevant any longer.
4. Create the subnets and spread them across Availability Zones.
5. Determine the external connectivity, and attach the Internet gateway, virtual private gateway, and/or NAT gateway to the VPC.
6. Create route tables. Consider the NAT gateway Availability Zone requirements and subnet security requirements for routing.
7. Add route table entries to the Internet gateway, virtual private gateway, or NAT gateway.
8. Associate the route table to the subnets.
9. Create any pre-approved security groups instances should use.

It’s beneficial to follow these manual steps a few times to understand the components, but for accuracy and automation, we recommend that you use AWS CloudFormation to manage network configuration. CloudFormation makes it easy to spin up, spin down, and make changes to networks by using JSON to organize the configuration. Read more in the AWS CloudFormation documentation, and check out these sample VPC templates.

Connecting to the WAN – AWS Direct Connect

If you want to connect the AWS network into your existing WAN architecture, it’s important to understand how to use AWS Direct Connect.

Figure 1: A Direct Connect architecture with both a public and a private virtual interface

AWS Direct Connect: This service allows you to physically connect into the AWS network to connect to your AWS services. Direct Connect locations are public datacenters that have AWS operated private backbone connectivity to AWS regions.  In these locations, you can connect into the Direct Connect routers to extend your network into AWS. There are Direct Connect points of presence in every region, and each point of presence has one or more routers with 1/10G ports you can request.  Direct Connect allows for private communication over a dedicated line, and can provide additional security, performance, and privacy. It can also bridge the network architecture gap between on-premises networks and AWS. Check out our Direct Connect partners.

The requirements for Direct Connect connectivity are:

• A Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) peering session per virtual interface
• A unique VLAN per virtual interface
• An Ethernet connection (1/10G SMF, 1000BASE-LX/10GBASE-LR)
• A virtual gateway in the VPC for which you want connectivity

These requirements offer a good deal of flexibility for connectivity options to your WAN. A simple scenario for an MPLS WAN would be to add a MPLS router to the facility where you want to use Direct Connect. To the rest of the MPLS network, this would look like another branch. The next step is to acquire an interconnect from your router in the DX location to the DX router, which a number of Direct Connect Partners can supply.

If you have a Layer 2 WAN (like VPLS), then you can do the BGP peering in a different location.

Virtual interface: A virtual interface is like a subinterface on a router in a virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) table, with a route in the VRF toward a specific location. This location could be a single VPC, or the collection of public AWS services such as Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, and more. Virtual interfaces can be private or public. A single Direct Connect connection can contain many virtual interfaces, each with their own VLAN, which only has local significance because all connectivity is routed.

Private virtual interfaces are used to route a Direct Connect connection to a specific VPC. On the AWS Direct Connect router, a VLAN is used to define the subinterface and has its own BGP peering session. The private interface is mapped to a VPC-enabling private connectivity. The destination VPC can be in another account. A private IP address and private BGP ASN can be used.

Public virtual interfaces allow for direct routing into AWS’s public services. Connections would originate somewhere outside AWS, come in through the WAN connection in the Direct Connect location, through the Direct Connect router, and then over AWS’s backbone to the correct public service.

Figure 2: Public virtual interfaces advertise the addresses for public services in all US Regions.

In the United States, public services from every region are advertised over this connection.  For example, this would allow a public virtual interface in a Direct Connect location in N. Virginia to connect to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets hosted in the N. California Region using the AWS backbone instead of the Internet. Public virtual interfaces should be treated and secured like any other Internet-facing service, and require a public /30 address to be assigned and advertised. If a public ASN is used, it must be owned by the customer; otherwise, a private ASN can be used.

Network-to-Network Interface (NNI): Not everyone wants a dedicated router or 1G connection into AWS.  AWS Direct Connect Partners can provide you with varying connection options. A NNI allows a partner to manage the connection and router, and to offer speeds under 1G (50, 100, 200 , 300, 400 , 500 Mbps).

Hosted virtual interfaces are virtual interfaces offered by APN partners that host NNI connections. They can be public or private, and offer speeds under 1G (50, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 Mbps).

Advanced Networking and Features

So far, we’ve discussed general use cases for a VPC. Let’s dive into some of the more advanced topics and features.

VPC peering: VPC peering enables two VPCs in the same AWS Region to communicate with each other. It’s similar to having a group of subnets share routing reachability with each other―almost like putting a static route on each side of a network that was otherwise partitioned. Peering simply enables network connectivity between two VPCs to be possible. Any actual reachability is enabled with configuration of route tables, security groups, and network ACLs.

VPC peering allows instances to directly communicate with one another while residing in two different VPCs, even across accounts. Peering is established when one side initiates a request and the other VPC accepts. Peering adds an option in the routing table to point routes towards the new VPC peering connection. Each subnet that needs connectivity across the peering connection will need a route in the associated routing table.

Figure 3: A route entry is added in the 10.0.1.0/24 and 11.0.1.0/24 subnets for a VPC peering connection. For the 10.0.2.0/24 and 11.0.2.0/24 subnets to have connectivity, they would need a route entry as well.

In Figure 3, a VPC peering connection has been established between VPC 10.0.0.0/16 and 11.0.0.0/16. To enable subnet 10.0.1.0/24 to communicate with 11.0.1.0/24, a route has been added to each routing table for the respective VPC’s CIDR range. In this example the full CIDR /16 was used, but for more specific routing between the two subnets the /24 range could be used as well.

There are a few things to keep in mind when using VPC peering: transitive routing, VPC limits, and CIDR overlap. First, as detailed in the “Routing and Switching” section in part one of this blog post, traffic can’t come from outside a VPC and leave the VPC. You can use instances that act as routers or proxies to enable these flows. Furthermore, peering operates only when there are no CIDR conflicts. This could impact your subnet and CIDR design, and using less common (not 10.0.0.0/16 or 172.16.0.0/16!) CIDR ranges reduces this risk. When assessing VPC peering as a connectivity feature, check that the VPC limits meet your requirements. For example, the VPC peering limit is 50 peering connections by default, with 125 as the hard limit.

Figure 4: Route table for two subnets, allowing Instance A and C to reach the S3 endpoint

Amazon S3 endpoint: There are AWS services that were originally designed to be consumed over the Internet, like Amazon S3. Amazon S3 allows users to store and retrieve objects, and can have high bandwidth requirements for large or commonly accessed files. Before S3 endpoints were introduced, an instance in a private VPC needed a way to access the Internet for S3 files.  You could route requests through a proxy, but the proxy could be a performance and availability bottleneck. This posed a problem for network administrators who wanted to limit Internet access and provide high bandwidth for instances.

With S3 endpoints, you can create a private route in your VPC that allows you to route traffic directly to and from S3 in your VPC. Think of this as adding a collection of /32 routes for all the live S3 IP addresses you want to use, which is called a prefix list (pl-xxxxxxx) in AWS.  The prefix list in Figure 4 points to an endpoint (vpce-xxxxxxxx) that corresponds to the service―in this case, S3.  This allows you to forward traffic within a private VPC without any bandwidth or availability bottlenecks.

S3 was the first AWS service with endpoints, and AWS is constantly evaluating endpoints for other services. For more detailed information, check out the VPC Endpoints documentation.

Figure 5: A single Elastic IP address is assigned to one instance, and is used to forward traffic. The second instance monitors the first instance, and, if failure is detected, makes an API call to move the Elastic IP address to itself. Session traffic is dropped unless the instances are doing state synchronization.

Virtual IP: A virtual IP is a building block of on-premises networks that allows a single IP address to be present on multiple systems at once. An elastic network interface (ENI) that moves between two or more instances is similar to a virtual IP. This is also called a floating ENI, and is one way to emulate a virtual IP. There are a few differences between an ENI and a virtual IP:

• The time to move an ENI is not constant, and may take several seconds.
• We recommend that you use an external monitoring system to do health checks on the instances that are using the shared ENI, though systems can also monitor themselves, similar to Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) and Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP).
• The private address of an ENI is specific to a subnet, and thus to an Availability Zone.
• Simply moving the IP address doesn’t mean that all instances will have the same TCP state. Use synchronization features (like clustering) to keep TCP state between instances.
• You can choose to associate an Elastic IP address between a set of secondary ENIs or move an ENI with associated IP addresses to another machine. In other words, you can move the address or you can move the interface. The interface (ENI) is specific to the subnet, and the IP (Elastic IP) is specific to the region. If you move an Elastic IP address between Availability Zones or subnets, the public address will remain the same and the private address will change.

VPC Flow Logs: VPC Flow Logs are similar to scheduled NetFlow/sFlow/IPFIX reports. Flow logs collect the source and destination IP, source and destination ports, protocol, packet counts, and ALLOW or DENY action for a particular VPC, subnet, or ENI. They are currently collected and sent as a report every 10 minutes.

Enhanced networking: Enhanced networking is available on particular instance types to enable faster network performance when there is operating system support. This feature can reduce network latency, CPU overhead, and enable more efficient network packet processing. For more information, see the Amazon EC2 documentation.

Limits: When designing VPC networks, we recommend that you review the VPC limits to determine whether your network design fits the capabilities of the VPC. The documentation specifies which limits you can raise by contacting support, and which limits you can’t change. For example, VPC peering may solve many of your problems, but if you need more than 125 peering connections it may affect your design. As another example, if your subnet and CIDR blocks are highly fragmented, you will want to find a way to get it under the 100 routes that can be propagated into a VPC.

Wrapping Up

There are many ways to build your network on AWS. In this post, I’ve explained common building blocks to understand as you build a VPC, how these components work, and how they relate to concepts in the traditional networking world. If you’re hungry for more details, check out these additional resources:

• VPC Best Practices: Video
• Direct Connect Redundancy Design: Video
• Another Day, Another Billion Packets: Video
• AWS Amazon VPC Documentation

In the comments section, please tell us what you would like to hear more about. We’re always interested in hearing about network problems we can help you solve.

In February and March we hosted two workshops for APN Partners focused on helping partners build skills in NoSQL and IoT on AWS.

These workshops were hosted in Seattle and Boston, respectively, and are intended to provide our top APN Consulting Partners with the opportunity to dive deep with a number of AWS services. “These workshops are designed to bring our top APN Consulting Partners, namely Advanced, Premier, MSP and Competency, closer to strategic services and use cases. Our partners have been asking for deeper visibility into strategic services that their customers are asking for, including AWS IoT, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Kinesis,” says Chuck Edwards, Partner Service Delivery Manager for AWS. “Our solution architects, service teams, and business development teams build great content all the time, so we sourced the best content and creators/presenters to speak directly with our top partners about key use cases for these services and provide some hands-on experience. Ideally we want attending partners to (a) become more aware of these services and appropriate use cases when talking to their customers, and (b) have a clear grasp of how to best implement these services and who they can talk to for help.”

We’ll be hosting these workshops again in New York next week from April 26th – 27th, and wanted to provide a recap of our latest event in Boston, along with some of the feedback we’ve received.

Workshop Agendas

NoSQL

The full-day NoSQL workshop covered the following topics:

• Big Data Architectural Patterns and Best Practices on AWS
• Why is NoSQL a strategic partner opportunity?
• Migrating from RDBMS to NoSQL
• Running MongoDB on EC2
• DDB Design Patterns and Best Practices + Hands-on Lab
• Event-driven Programming with Amazon DynamoDB Streams and AWS Lambda + Hands-on Lab

IoT

The full-day IoT workshop covered an overview of Amazon Kinesis and Amazon DynamoDB in IoT use cases, as well as a deep dive and walkthrough of AWS IoT integration with other AWS services. The focus of the day was on 4+ hours of hands-on lab work. Attendees connected Intel Edison breakout kits to their laptops, and then worked through a series of labs that included AWS IoT, Lambda, Kinesis, and DynamoDB. Attendees also had the opportunity to meet ‘Ratchet’, an IoT robot accepting voice commands via Amazon Alexa. Attendees used skills acquired through the workshop to instruct Ratchet to do certain things such as ‘Move’, ‘Attack’, and ‘Speak’. Ratchet is British…just in case you were wondering.

APN Partner Participant Feedback

We’ve received a lot of valuable feedback from the APN Partners who have participated, including participants from two AWS Premier Consulting Partners, Slalom and AppsAssociates:

“We really enjoyed attending the DynamoDB/IoT workshop in February. The speakers were great and the content was very informative. I definitely feel that I can have more informed discussions with our clients on how to best solve their data needs in AWS.”

 

-Dave Masino

 

Solution Principal, Information Management & Analytics at Slalom

 

“The NoSQL Databases and AWS IoT workshops were very valuable. In my opinion, the content was so well organized that the amount of learning you get in two days is simply not possible on your own time. The training not only covered current state and future direction of applicable services, but also provided information on real world case studies along with a deep-dive into business value proposition.

 

Taking two days out of the work schedule may seem like a tough task, but after taking this class I feel much more confident and prepared to talk about these services and solution areas with customers and prospects.”

 

-Kshitij Kumar

 

Global VP and CTO, AppsAssociates

Upcoming Workshops

The team will be hosting workshops around the globe, with upcoming workshops for qualified APN Partners in New York on April 26 – 27, and San Francisco on May 24 – 25. Reach out to your Partner Manager for more information about attending.

Editor’s note – our team had great conversations with a number of companies yesterday at the AWS Chicago Summit who were interested in learning more about becoming a member of the AWS partner ecosystem, and the journey of our top partners. Today, we want to share with you the perspective of Dorothy Copeland, Director of Global Partner Programs for AWS, on joining the APN and growing your business as an APN partner. 

People often ask me why they should partner with AWS.  The answer is simple:  You want an exceptionally successful cloud business. We want to support you along the way. Whether you’re building software solutions on AWS or providing consulting services regarding AWS, we invite you to come join us, and provide additional value to your customers around the globe.

With tens of thousands of members worldwide, the AWS Partner Network (APN) is focused on providing a great APN partner and customer experience.  Companies of all sizes around the world work with us at all stages of their cloud solution and services development, whether looking to AWS to help provide technical guidance in building their solutions, or to engage in joint go-to-market. Becoming an APN partner can help you shorten customer sales cycles, and give customers budget and time to spend on other initiatives. It can enable you to move more quickly and offer your customers global solutions, provide you with on-going revenue streams, and enable you to build innovative solutions and services up the stack to solve customers’ business needs, all on top of the agile, cost-effective, and scalable AWS platform.

We consider joining the APN as the start to your journey, and we want to help provide you with best practices as you grow your business. As you get started as a member of the APN, take advantage of the APN web portal, APN partner-focused white papers, and webcasts. I encourage you to ensure your entire cloud-focused team takes advantage of our free online Business, Technical, and TCO and Cloud Economics accreditation courses as pertinent to each individual’s role. Getting your technical employees AWS-trained and certified is of paramount importance to your success as an APN member, and our training team has made available a wealth of resources for you. I recommend you download the APN Partner Learning Plan to get started.

As your AWS-based business matures, you can qualify to become an APN Standard or higher-tier Technology Partner or Consulting Partner, where you’ll become eligible for a number of additional benefits. One of the key benefits in becoming a higher-tier APN Partner is qualifying to apply for APN Partner Programs. I recommend you think about the APN Partner Programs that make sense for your business model. Consider joining the Channel Reseller Program, for instance, if you are a Consulting Partner and value owning your customers’ experience from end-to-end. Do you plan to deliver applications via software as a service (SaaS) on AWS? Take advantage of the AWS SaaS Partner Program. As you become an Advanced Partner, we will validate your offerings through third-party audits as a part of the approval process to join the Managed Service Provider Program and the AWS Competency Program. We will help enable you to market your solutions on our Partner Directory and Competency Solutions webpages.  As you grow your business and want to engage in go-to-market with us, you can qualify for co-marketing funds and customer proof of concept funding to help you engage more quickly with customers and win new opportunities faster.

Tens of thousands of APN partners around the world have built successful businesses on AWS.  Here’s what some of our top partners have to say about working with the APN:

“The Looker business has grown significantly since we’ve become an APN partner. Over the last year, we’ve seen 5X revenue growth, and tremendous expansion within our operational base. Becoming an APN Competency Partner has really benefited Looker’s business greatly. We’re now able to communicate how we leverage the different AWS services that are tailored specifically to our customer’s needs.”

 

– Keenan Rice, VP of Alliances, Looker

Learn more here >>

“The APN has had a fundamental impact in both how we can grow and scale, and mature our business.”

 

– Pontus Noren, Founder and CEO, Cloudreach

Learn more here >>

“We’ve experienced great support from the APN in all areas, including leveraging technical and go-to-market support. Our AWS Partner Manager proactively supports us in all areas, and has provided valuable information and guidance on how to best leverage the APN and generate awareness within AWS on our joint go-to-market initiatives.”

 

– Jeffrey Weiner, VP, Business Development of North American Partners, Software AG

Learn more here >>

So how do you get started?  Learn more about the AWS Partner Network, join the APN, and then log in to our APN Portal, where you can access our business and technical training, and download our partner-focused business and technical white papers.  As you progress as a partner, I encourage you to learn more about how to become a Standard, Advanced, and Premier APN Partner, and all of the benefits that come with moving up the partner tiers. Want to learn about what other partners’ journeys on AWS? Visit our Partner Success page.

We welcome you to our vibrant and growing ecosystem!

Mick is CEO of 47Lining, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN) with the Big Data Competency designation. He holds an AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification.

Amazon Machine Learning is a service that provides predictive capabilities, the results of which can be incorporated into a wide variety of downstream applications and business processes. At 47Lining we’ve had the opportunity to partner with customers in several industry verticals to apply Amazon Machine Learning. These efforts apply predictive capabilities to optimize a wide range of operational and consumer-centric processes like establishing supply chain delivery expectations, preventing customer churn and identifying future consumer credit behaviors.

As with any relatively new service or capability, customers want to understand how it is positioned in the market and how it compares to alternative choices that are available to them. As our customers have adopted Amazon Machine Learning, we listened to what they really like about it. Here’s what we’ve heard:

Amazon Machine Learning enables widespread application of predictive analytics. Amazon Machine Learning is easy to use. It can be applied by a broader array of contributors than has ever been the case. This is driving the democratization – and commoditization – of using predictive capabilities to optimize business processes. Our customers love the “gain” that Amazon Machine Learning provides to small agile teams. The visual tools provided in the AWS Console help diverse practitioners easily assess training datasets, review model quality and iteratively refine their approach. The service makes it easier for practitioners to apply machine learning to successfully enhance key metrics for high-value activities. Because the service makes such optimizations more repeatable and cost-effective, customers can scale their efforts to improve additional business processes.

Amazon Machine Learning covers a broad array of common business processes from many industries. While it is not a fit for all categories of learning problems, the learning approaches implemented today within Amazon Machine Learning allow our customers to increase efficiency in a wide array of business processes.  For example:

• Accurately Predicting Customer Churn. 47Lining worked closely with AWS to deliver a predictive analytics engagement for a media & entertainment customer with investments in original content programming.  The engagement focused on business impact of predicting customer churn. We fused online video platform logs with 3rd party zip code demographics and social media sentiment. This data was then analyzed to extract features used to drive the learning process, such as viewing hours per quarter, daytime vs. nighttime viewing, and depth of long-tail viewing for each user. Amazon Machine Learning was used to predict customer churn with 71% accuracy.  These predictive capabilities enabled our customer to create a “sticky” conversation with their customers through relevant offers for viewer retention.  We estimate that for a typical video subscription platform, modest improvements in churn rate can yield on the order of $2-5M in annual retained subscriber revenues and avoided replacement customer acquisition costs.
• Predicting Consumer Credit Behavior. We had the opportunity to work with RevolutionCredit, a pioneering behavioral data and analytics platform that helps creditors identify upwardly mobile customers, leading to more – and higher quality – approvals, lower delinquencies, higher retention and more engaged consumers. Based on the behavioral data from the platform, we partnered with RevolutionCredit’s Chief Scientist, Hutch Carpenter and CTO, Rama Thamman to apply Amazon Machine Learning to classify consumers and identify opportunities that benefit both consumers and creditors.  This use case represents a “high-volume optimization” scenario – because volumes are high, even modest improvements can have a large impact. For example, identifying the likelihood of write-offs through behavioral signals can provide 12% better predictive power than traditional measures of credit scores and late payments alone. For financial institutions, this improvement can represent millions of dollars in profits.
• Lead Scoring for Propensity to Purchase Real Estate. One of our customers develops high-end real estate properties. We are helping them to develop a lead-scoring model using Amazon Machine Learning that predicts propensity to purchase high-end real estate based on a combined set of public and private data sources.  The goal is to increase the efficiency of the sales prospecting process, which results directly in a higher net-present-value return on their capital intensive construction projects.For a sizable capital project in this industry (on the order of $1 Billion), shrinking the average time to close for individual transactions by just 11% through improved targeting can improve the net-present-value of the project by over $50 Million.

These are just a few examples – as our customers continue to create wins through optimizing initial processes, additional opportunities to optimize their business operations or interactions with customers come into focus.

Amazon Machine Learning makes it easy to “go wide” during training.  One of the most important steps in producing quality machine learning models is engineering and generating the features used for training from the underlying raw data. It is not always apparent which combinations of features will lead to superior model quality and most practitioners brainstorm many alternatives, undertaking lots of empirical experimentation to understand which alternatives produce the best results. Amazon Machine Learning provides a set of feature engineering “recipes” that minimize data preparation requirements. Practitioners can use this capability to easily specify and build many models from source data inputs in parallel and quickly observe which ones work best. This conserves the precious time and energy of human practitioners by fanning out to relatively inexpensive compute resources instead, with all of the provisioning required for training handled seamlessly by the service.

Amazon Machine Learning has a really simple DevOps model.  As optimizations launch to production, Amazon Machine Learning’s simple DevOps model saves our customers real money because the service “just works”. It enables periodic batch predictions as well as elastically scaling highly available real-time prediction services. Some of our customers require batch predictions to be generated for hundreds of millions of samples each night. Others require a highly available real-time predictor service to be available with consistently low latency at global consumer scale. After we architect a solution with Amazon Machine Learning, our customers need not be concerned with operations and maintenance of underlying clusters or other infrastructure. Such an approach becomes even more important as predictive analytics are used in an increasing number of critical business processes.

Amazon Machine Learning’s predictable, elastic pricing model makes it easy to create a winning business case. The elastic pricing for Amazon Machine Learning scales with the operations of your business process. This makes business stakeholders very comfortable since up front implementation costs are small and the value of resulting optimizations typically far exceed the very predictable costs associated with the Machine Learning models and predictions that support them.

Whenever we talk with customers about the opportunities that they see to apply machine learning and predictive analytics, we grow more excited. This is a technology that we feel will reshape most business processes in most companies. We’re quite excited to be helping our customers play a leading role in this transformation and look forward to future releases of Amazon Machine Learning.

Want to learn more about 47Lining? Visit the company’s website here.

Note: The content and opinions in this blog are those of the third party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.

The following is a guest post from Cameron Stokes, Solutions Engineer at AWS DevOps Competency Partner HashiCorp. 

AWS CodeDeploy automates code deployments to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and on-premises instances, allowing developers to customize deployment steps as needed per their application requirements. HashiCorp Consul is an open-source tool providing service discovery and orchestration for modern applications.

Used together, CodeDeploy and Consul can enable developers to confidently deploy their applications while helping to ensure the health and stability of their overall application environment. In this post, we’ll demonstrate how Consul can complement CodeDeploy by:

• Registering applications for service discovery during deployment
• Marking applications and nodes as “under maintenance” during deployments
• Halting deployments if application instances become unhealthy
• Providing configuration data to applications

We will demonstrate how Consul and AWS CodeDeploy can be used together to quickly deploy applications in a dynamic environment without impacting application stability.

Setup

To get started, clone the repository https://github.com/hashicorp/atlas-examples/ to your local workstation, and then follow the instructions in the aws-codedeploy-consul README. To assist with the initial setup of the application environment (including VPC, instances, and CodeDeploy resources), we’ll use Terraform for provisioning our AWS resources and Atlas for bootstrapping our Consul cluster, both provided by HashiCorp.

Once your demo environment is created, you can deploy the SampleApp_Linux_Consul application by following the instructions in the output from the terraform apply command.

Integration Details

With Consul available for assisting with deployments, we can customize our CodeDeploy application specification file (AppSpec file) for service discovery, health monitoring, and application configuration.

CodeDeploy Deployment Configuration

To set up our application and register it with Consul, we define a few files to install as a part of our deployment in the files section of our AppSpec file. The files are:

• index.html.ctmpl – The web page for our application. The extension .ctmpl is used to indicate that this is a template file that we’ll use to configure our application during installation. This is explained in more detail later in this blog post.
• health – A file used for determining the health of our application.
• sampleapp.json – The service definition file for registering our service with Consul.

These files are installed during the deployment’s Install event, and by customizing other events in the deployment lifecycle, we can integrate our application with Consul. These event hooks occur in this order:

The appspec.yml file in our aws-codedeploy-consul example looks like this:

The event hooks and scripts that are executed are:

• ApplicationStop
  • scripts/consul_enable_maintenance – Enables “maintenance mode” on the node, which removes the node from service lookups via Consul. When the node is in maintenance mode, dependent systems in our application environment will stop sending requests to the web server on this node.
  • scripts/stop_server – Stops the web server.
• BeforeInstall
  • scripts/install_dependencies – Installs our application’s dependencies, such as our web server.
  • scripts/start_server – Starts the web server.
• AfterInstall
  • scripts/consul_reload – Instructs Consul to reload its configuration in case our service or healthcheck definitions have changed.
• ApplicationStart
  • scripts/consul_update_from_kv – Updates our application configuration from Consul’s Key/Value datastore. Consul’s Key/Value datastore is explained in more detail later in this blog post.
  • scripts/consul_disable_maintenance – Disables “maintenance mode” on the node, and re-adds the node to Consul’s service catalog.
• ValidateService
  • scripts/consul_validate_health – Verifies that Consul perceives our updated application as healthy, which allows other dependent systems to send requests to the web server on this node.

If any of these scripts fails, such as consul_validate_health determining that our application is not healthy within Consul, the CodeDeploy deployment will halt and prevent further instances from being updated. This allows you to troubleshoot the failed deployment and push a fixed application revision or redeploy a previous stable revision.

Service Discovery Integration

To register our application with Consul for service discovery, we define the name of our application, its port, and healthcheck configuration in a service definition file. As defined in our AppSpec, the service definition file (/conf/sampleapp.json) is installed, and the Consul agent reloads its configuration in the AfterInstall event hook. Once the configuration is reloaded, Consul will begin monitoring our application and make it it available for service discovery.

More details on the service definition file format are in Consul’s documentation. In our sample application, the Consul service definition file (/conf/sampleapp.json) looks like this:

Application Configuration

In addition to providing service discovery functionality, Consul also provides a Key/Value store. This can be used to hold dynamic configuration and supports distributed systems such as leader election and check-and-set operations.

We can use Consul’s Key/Value store to configure our application during deployment. During our initial setup with Terraform, the Key/Value store was populated with the following data:

By prefixing our keys with our CodeDeploy deployment group name SampleApp_Linux_Consul, we can configure multiple applications or environments using the same Consul cluster.

To configure our application, we use the tool consul-template. This tool provides a convenient way to populate values from Consul to the file system using a file template.

During the ApplicationStart event hook, the script consul_update_from_kv calls consul-template specifying /tmp/index.html.ctmpl as our template and writing the rendered template to the document root of our web server /var/www/html/index.html:

A snippet of our template looks like this:

Our template uses the DEPLOYMENT_GROUP_NAME environment variable provided by the CodeDeploy agent to determine the Key/Value path prefix to use for configuring our application. Again, this allows you to configure multiple applications or environments with CodeDeploy and Consul.

The template then iterates over the range of keys and outputs a table of our application configuration data. The final configured application should look like this:

You can edit the Key/Value data with the Consul Web UI URL linked in the terraform apply output, and on your next application deployment you will see the updated configuration data. consul-template can also be configured to run as a service, providing faster and dynamic configuration updates to your application.

Conclusion

In this post we’ve demonstrated how AWS CodeDeploy and HashiCorp Consul can be a great combination for engineers to confidently and reliably deploy modern service-based applications.

Note: Be sure to follow the teardown instructions in the project readme to delete the resources we’ve created so that you will not be charged for them going forward. Also be sure to remove any remaining sample application revisions in your Amazon S3 bucket that are no longer needed.

The content and opinions in this blog are those of the third party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.

One of the biggest benefits coming from our diverse global APN ecosystem is the variety of solutions developed by both Technology and Consulting partners that complement one another. And we often hear of opportunities that APN partners have to work together to solve business needs. Today, we’d like to highlight upcoming webinars from three Advanced APN Technology partners, CloudCheckr, CloudHealth, and Orbitera, who are in the billing and cost optimization space and provide solutions other APN partners may find valuable for the work that they do on AWS, particularly AWS Channel Resellers. These technology partners’ solutions can assist with the general re-billing process by creating a list cost billing report, with Reserved Instance (RI) or Credit allocations, or with customer invoice generation.  Some solutions offer additional services like cost optimization reporting and planning services.

These three partners will each be hosting informational webinars to demonstrate how they can potentially impact your business as an APN Partner. You are invited to register for any of the following partner-hosted webinars to learn more about each solution.

CloudCheckr

Webinar: Smart Ways To Grow Your AWS Reseller Business And Increase Your Margins

Option 1: Thursday, April 14th at 11:30am EDT

Register here >> 

Option 2: Friday, April 15th at 12:00pm AEST

Register here >>

CloudHealth

Webinar: Accelerate Your Business with CloudHealth

Option 1: Wednesday, April 20th at 11:30am EDT

Register here >>

Option 2: Thursday, April 21st at 12:00pm AEST

Register here >>

Orbitera

Webinar: Driving Success for AWS Resellers

Option 1: Thursday, April 21st at 10:00am PDT

Register here >>

Option 2: Friday, April 22nd at 11am AEST

Register here >>

Want to learn more about the AWS Channel Reseller Program? Click here.

We’ve talked a lot recently about what it means to be a next-generation Managed Service Provider (MSP). Turns out, this is a hot topic across our ecosystem as well. Today, we want to highlight a recent eBook published by Advanced APN Technology Partner CloudMGR. With offices in Australia and San Francisco, CloudMGR connects all of a customer’s important systems into a single platform, which allows for improved billing, provisioning, monitoring, support, and more. The company’s mission is to give a business the visibility and control required to get the most from their Cloud. CloudMGR currently works with AWS for Managed Service Providers (MSP), Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud Consulting and Enterprise businesses. CloudMGR is an AWS SaaS Partner, AWS Marketplace seller, and a Certified AWS MSP Technology Partner.

The cloud experts at CloudMGR recently published an eBook entitled, “How to Succeed as a Next-Gen MSP with AWS”. The eBook walks through a number of different recommendations from CloudMGR for APN Partners looking to thrive as a next-generation MSP with AWS. Click here to visit the download page.

Want to meet the CloudMGR team? Swing by the company’s booth at the AWS Sydney Summit! CloudMGR is a Gold Sponsor.

We continuously enhance our technical courses to stay current with the pace of AWS platform updates and incorporate student feedback.  We have made substantial updates to our two most popular foundational training courses, AWS Technical Essentials and Architecting on AWS, to better provide you with actionable knowledge to get started creating solutions with AWS and a path to advanced learning.  Both courses are recommended as part of our Learning Plan for Technical Professionals.

AWS Technical Essentials – What’s New

One-day course for solutions architects, developers, sysops administrators, and anyone who wants to get started using AWS

This course covers the foundations of cloud computing, storage, and networking.  It’s also used as the content for AWSome Days.  The updated course now addresses 18 AWS services, with in-depth coverage of 10 core services: EC2, S3, EBS, IAM, Auto Scaling, ELB, RDS, DynamoDB, Auto Scaling, and CloudWatch.  New, comprehensive hands-on lab exercises and instructor-led demonstrations help students learn how to get started creating real-world solutions on the AWS platform.  The updated course also provides students with a clearer path to continue their education with more advanced courses such as Architecting on AWS and Systems Operations on AWS. Read more

Architecting on AWS – What’s New

Three-day course for solutions architects and solution design engineers

This three-day course aligns with the changes to AWS Technical Essentials, making the concepts learned in that course a prerequisite.  The updated course now focuses on cloud best practices, architecture patterns, case studies, and other practical ways of thinking about how to architect infrastructure on AWS.  Hands-on lab exercises walk you through how to build complete application environments on AWS using a variety of AWS services, including Amazon VPC, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Lambda, and more.  New content also addresses automating and de-coupling infrastructures using architectures less dependent on servers, troubleshooting commonly misconfigured architectures, and concepts from the Well-Architected Framework. Read more

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