Category: APN Consulting Partners

Special thanks to Aleksandar Nenov, CEO & Founder, CLOUDWEBOPS, and Ross Barich, Developer Marketing Manager, AWS, who contributed to this post. 

Aleksandar Nenov is a Senior IT professional in Cloud Web Operations and Managed AWS Services. An AWS user since 2009, he has a deep understanding of AWS solutions from a business, technical, and service-management perspective, and has helped dozens of small and large businesses benefit from running their workloads in the AWS Cloud.  Aleksandar is CEO and Founder of CLOUDWEBOPS, and he’s also the founder and organizer of the AWS User Group Serbia. Aleksandar has created an AWS community of over 300 members and has inspired AWS enthusiasts from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, and Romania to do the same in their countries. This spring he was recognized for his community building efforts by being selected as an AWS Community Hero.

CLOUDWEBOPS is one of the first AWS Consulting Partners in Serbia. Made up of freelance DevOps AWS experts from all over the world, CLOUDWEBOPS decided to become an AWS consultancy and use AWS exclusively due to the firm’s belief in the quality and benefits of using AWS. CLOUDWEBOPS became an APN Consulting Partner in December 2015, aiming to bring knowledge to the growing local IT market in Serbia. According to Aleksander, there is an interest in AWS technology, however there is an opportunity to expand collective knowledge about the platform. CLOUDWEBOPS focuses both on helping companies who want to use AWS, and providing training and support to help individuals seeking to grow in their knowledge of AWS. The company’s end goal is to offer the Serbian market deep AWS consultative services.

An example of their consulting efforts is the help that CLOUDWEBOPS provided another firm as the firm became an APN Partner. In March 2016, Devana Technologies, from Belgrade, became one of the first APN Technology Partners in Southeast Europe. CLOUDWEBOPS worked closely with Devana in deploying their product ManageWP Orion on AWS, and helped them as they became a member of the APN. This is a great achievement for both APN Partners in the region.

You can learn the full story of CLOUDWEBOPS here.

Curious to learn how some of our top AWS Partner Network (APN) Consulting and Technology Partners have grown their businesses on AWS?

We’ve recently published seven new AWS Partner Success videos. The APN Partners featured in our newest videos collectively hold a number of AWS Competencies, including the Big Data, DevOps, Government, Healthcare, Life Sciences, Marketing & Commerce, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, Migration, Mobile, and Security Competencies. Take a look!

Okta

Advanced APN Technology Partner; AWS Security Competency Partner

BlazeMeter

APN Technology Partner; AWS DevOps Competency Partner

Cloud Technology Partners

AWS Premier Consulting Partner; AWS DevOps Competency Partner; AWS Migration Competency Partner

Cloudreach

AWS Premier Consulting Partner; AWS Managed Service Provider; AWS DevOps Competency Partner; AWS Migration Competency Partner

REAN Cloud

AWS Premier Consulting Partner; AWS Managed Service Provider; AWS DevOps Competency Partner; AWS Migration Competency Partner; AWS Life Sciences Competency Partner; AWS Government Competency Partner

Slalom

AWS Premier Consulting Partner; AWS DevOps Competency Partner; AWS Big Data Competency Partner; AWS Migration Competency Partner; AWS Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange Competency Partner; AWS Mobile Competency Partner

Logicworks

AWS Premier Consulting Partner; AWS Managed Service Provider; AWS DevOps Competency Partner; AWS Migration Competency Partner; AWS Healthcare Competency Partner; AWS Marketing & Commerce Competency Partner

Check out all of our Partner Success videos here!

Special thanks to Jordin Green, Global Head of Industry Marketing & Global Healthcare and Global Life Sciences Marketing Lead, AWS and Gretchen Murphy, PR Manager at Medidata Solutions.

AWS Life Science Competency Partner Medidata Solutions is a leading SaaS company solely focused on helping life sciences companies conduct faster, safer, less expensive, and more insightful clinical research. Medidata Solutions’s cloud technology platform uses AWS to power clinical trials for more than 600 life sciences customers. Medidata Solutions has been very successful at educating their customers on the benefits of using AWS commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) services as an underlying platform within their GxP SaaS solutions. Given the highly regulated nature of clinical trials and the confidential patient data that is collected, it is essential for Medidata Solutions and its customers to be GxP compliant.

GxP requirements apply to organizations that make regulated food and medical products such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and mobile medical applications.  GxP is a general term for Good (Something) Practice.  The “x” simply represents a variable. For example, GCP is an acronym for Good Clinical Practice, a set of standards for clinical trials.

Medidata Solutions – and its customers – consider AWS services COTS, and therefore the GxP controls are relatively detached from the actual AWS service components. For Medidata Solutions, the majority of its procedures used for app design, development, testing etc., stayed consistent when using AWS services.

Medidata Solution’s clients assess cloud-based software that operates with AWS services in much the same way as on-premises software built on top of COTS operating systems, databases, and storage hardware.

The company has found that the majority of GxP clients tend to focus their validation of necessary controls at the software and logical layers of the stack (i.e., the customer responsibility portion of the AWS Shared Responsibility security model). However, for those determined sponsors that did dive deep into how the AWS services were being leveraged, it became clear that the resilience provided by the use of AWS Availability Zones (AZs) and AWS services, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), demonstrated a clear benefit for the availability and durability of Medidata’s clinical cloud platform.  Customer discussions about validating AWS services often shifted conversations from, for example, backup to availability. This alteration in viewpoint is a major step forward in GxP systems since it establishes that GxP systems built with AWS services can be architected for high availability and continue operating even if a single system component or AWS service is temporarily unavailable.

Now that members of the APN, such as Medidata Solutions, have shown customers these enhanced architectures, sponsors of GxP systems have started to demand these systems from all their clients. Since customer obsession and customer trust are core leadership principals of the Amazonian team culture, we wanted to provide more guidance for sponsors that need guidance in making quality assessments of systems they chose to build on AWS. To meet this customer need, AWS created three key enablers for building and moving GxP systems onto AWS:

1. AWS’s ISO 9001 certification directly supports customers who develop, migrate and operate their quality-controlled IT systems on the AWS Cloud. Under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), customers and partners can leverage these compliance reports as evidence to validate their own ISO 9001 programs.
2. AWS Quality Manual, available upon request, is for AWS customers who have a Non-Disclosure Agreement and are in the process of performing a supplier assessment of AWS’s quality and security management controls
3. In cooperation with Lachman Consultants, a multidisciplinary team of highly experienced FDA and pharmaceutical industry experts, we’ve developed and published a new whitepaper, “Considerations for Using AWS Products in GxP Systems”

Tony Hewer, Senior Director of Quality & Regulatory affairs at Medidata Solutions tells us, “These items have positioned Medidata Solutions extremely well in the eyes of our customers. The materials are very insightful and enable us to put a very large check in the box that confirms we’ve performed the quality activity.”

To learn more about how your company can work with AWS to build or consult on GxP compliant workloads, be sure to check out the AWS Compliance page and watch a previously recorded webinar on Next Generation GxP Systems in the Cloud.

For those that want to dive into the details of starting a GxP partner practice on AWS, make sure to watch the APN Webcast series on the APN Portal.

• Overview – An overview of GxP compliance on AWS
• Quality Systems – Management responsibility, personnel, audits, purchasing, and recordkeeping.
• System Development Life Cycle – Development, validation, and operations.
• Regulatory Affairs – Regulatory submissions, health authority inspections, and personal data privacy controls for research participants.

The following is a guest post from our friends at AWS DevOps & AWS Migration Competency Partner Pythian. 

It’s no secret that the commoditization of computing resources, and cloud in particular, have removed a significant barrier to entry for organizations seeking platform scalability, elasticity, and rapid maturation. Cloud computing has created an opening for organizations of all sizes to compete on level ground, while aligning their costs of operations with demand and effectively supporting a more sustainable financial model. The broad service offering and the presence of reliable DevOps tools offered by AWS, such as AWS CloudFormation , AWS OpsWorks, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeCommit, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and AWS Config support automated, DevOps-style migrations of platforms of all sizes and complexities.

Migrating a platform to the cloud can be tackled in numerous different ways. Whether the migration is approached via the refactoring strategy or down to the traditional re-host strategy, the primary driver is to enable speed, agility and the freedom to experiment in a cost-efficient manner for your organization. Regardless of which route is chosen, they all require strategic planning and precise execution. If not planned well or if done incorrectly, a migration could result in downtime or potentially not allowing your organization to take full advantage of what the cloud has to offer.

Migrations require careful, granular planning, and a deep, cross-discipline understanding of platform intricacies. They also require the involvement and cooperation of a wide range of domain experts — from platform architects to operations experts, to developer resources — and a high degree of orchestration and focus on maintaining team coherence.

To resolve these incompatibilities, bridge the various disciplines, and realign the previously separate interests, advanced technology teams have been evolving their DevOps practices.

AWS provides deep guidance on what DevOps is, why it matters, and how to adopt a DevOps model. AWS defines DevOps as the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market. Adopting a DevOps model can have a fundamental impact on the success of your migration to the cloud.

DevOps supports an experiment-driven, fast-learning, flexible, and high-velocity engineering culture. It is designed to automate the repeatable parts and sequences of an application’s, and its supporting infrastructure’s, lifecycle (like build, test, deploy, scale, failover, recover, etc.) to make changes to the resulting software and production services as close to zero-cost as possible. The core DevOps principles of shared responsibility, agility, transparency, and lowered risks through heavy reliance on automation have proven to be crucial for handling complex projects requiring constant and precise risk management, such as enterprise platform migrations.

Early adoption and a commitment to DevOps practices enables low-risk execution of AWS migrations. DevOps also brings about a number of short and long-term business benefits, such as repeatability, auditability, significantly lower deployment risks, and faster iteration cycles – all crucial to employee retention, improved operational excellence, better security posture, and improved competitive advantage.

DevOps teams that have migrated their infrastructure and workload to the cloud using automation, have now enabled their organizations to run more experiments at significantly lower cost than previously possible, and to iterate at a more rapid pace than ever before.

Today, the most advanced teams in the world release each developer’s changes automatically to huge environments many times per day. Deploying more often and in smaller increments allows for significant risk reduction at the time of deployment. These smaller change deltas, coupled with fast feedback loops enabled by rigorous automated testing of each change increment, reduce the time it takes to find and correct bugs and further reduces deployment risks.

The Road to Maturity: Elements of a Mature DevOps Practice

We’ve learned a lot helping numerous customers migrate to AWS and build mature DevOps practices within their organization, and we want to share some best practices with you. Below is a brief overview of the environment we suggest you create, and the technologies your organization should embrace, to ensure ongoing improvements to your software and services to achieve your business goals.

CULTURAL SHIFT

• Create a culture of experimentation: Every product organization must make ongoing tradeoffs between velocity, performance, reliability, cost efficiency, and security, so it’s imperative to have blameless, respectful, and truthful discussions about decisions and outcomes. Adopting DevOps requires a deep commitment to continuous improvement throughout the organization. Continuous experimentation with a deep commitment to constant learning leads to continuous improvement, also known as “Kaizen”. The successful organization will learn to seek answers and limit the risk of bad assumptions. AWS Head of Enterprise Stephen Orban has also released a great series of blogs on creating a culture of experimentation, which you can read here.
• Get executive attention: The modern executive team should concern itself with improving its engineering leverage, and must be willing to seek help through the inherent disruption.
• Be customer focused: Commercial innovation is judged by the market. Empathy for the customer is a major differentiator.
• Embrace tool-driven collaboration: Mature DevOps teams are characterized by deep, efficient, tool-driven collaboration between skilled, cross-functional individuals working as part of a team, or teams, who execute a product development and operations lifecycle.
• Adopt data-driven decision making: Success comes from making good decisions over time. Business strategy and financial planning cycles must adapt to the reality of continually evolving markets by constantly seeking alignment with product and technology objectives — and vice versa. This requires an even closer, data-driven decision cycle at all levels.
• Get Lean and Agile: Adopting Lean principles and Agile methodologies is crucial to delivering DevOps in a highly productive, scalable, and efficient manner.

TECHNICAL PRACTICES

• Take an infrastructure-as-code approach: All development efforts should be cloud native, incorporate an infrastructure-as-code approach using tools like AWS CloudFormation, and avoid dependence on manual operations by leveraging appropriate public, private and/or hybrid cloud infrastructure. This approach allows you to automate manual and repetitive tasks and eliminate human errors as you configure, maintain, scale, and recover from faults, and ultimately fully automate the end-to-end infrastructure lifecycle.
• Automate application deployments: Application deployments should be guided by the principle of delivering value to the end user as quickly as possible. To attain high velocity, deployments must be automated, undergo rigorous automated testing, and upon successfully passing the tests, deployed to production. The entire software deployment pipeline should be optimized for defect detection, speed of delivery, and rapid feedback, with Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) as the goal.
• Optimize orchestration: Design, coordinate, and optimize the full infrastructure and application lifecycle processes by creating fast feedback loops, eliminating repetitive steps to optimize the speed and quality of new application capabilities.
• Integrate operational visibility early: Integrate operational visibility services as part of the development process, not as an afterthought.  Select and configure tools to monitor KPIs to maintain performance, detect issues, and provide alerts when those issues arise. Use pre-built operational visibility platforms like Pythian’s OpsViz stack, Amazon CloudWatch, Datadog, Splunk, Loggly, or Sumo Logic for general data aggregation, dashboards, triggering of actionable alerting, as well as reporting. Drive development efficiency and service quality using APM tools, like New Relic and AppDynamics.
• Create a CI/CD environment: With Continuous Integration (CI), you have an automated software integration and unit test environment that enables continuous validation of development changes.  Continuous Deployment (CD) gives you an automated production test, release, and rollback environment that enables frequent, high-quality production releases. When combined with a culture of experimentation, continuous delivery equals competitive advantage.

Pythian’s DevOps team, through an unshakeable dedication to end-to-end automation, continuous testing, and the application of modern software development practices to cloud migrations, has been able to consistently deliver predictable results to our customers throughout the lifetime of migration projects.  Learn more about what we’ve done for customers on AWS by reading about our customer TinyCo.

We have three upcoming AWS Partner Webinars featuring a select number of AWS Partners.

These webinars feature technical sessions led by AWS solutions architects and engineers, live demonstrations, customer examples, and Q&A with AWS experts.

Upcoming Webinars 

Grindr: Aggregate, Analyze, and Act on 900M Daily API Calls – Datadog

July 19, 2016 | 10:00 – 11:00 AM PST

Monitoring and making sense of infrastructure data can be an arduous process. Managing a volume of API calls from more than one million active users every minute presents an even more complex and demanding challenge. Using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Datadog, Grindr overcame a series of infrastructure challenges by both implementing and managing highly scalable, highly available, and top performing infrastructure, as well as aggregating, analyzing, and acting on key infrastructure data KPIs.

Register here >>

Join Us to Explore DevOps on AWS – REAN Cloud 

July 20, 2016 | 10:00 – 11:00 AM PST

Learn how REAN Cloud helped AWS customer Ellucian develop a DevOps framework to transform their software delivery process for over 80 product lines. Attendees will gain an understanding of a real-world continuous integration/continuous delivery framework that leverages Packer, Jenkins, Vagrant, and Terraform, along with other best practices.

Register here >> 

How MediaMath Turbo-charged DevOps with AWS and CloudCheckr – CloudCheckr

July 21, 2016 | 10:00 – 11:00 AM PST

DevOps is more than just an industry buzzword; it is a philosophy that forward-looking enterprises are deploying to move faster while staying safe. In 2007, MediaMath created the first software for real-time media buying for the digital marketing age. MediaMath’s technology analyzes more volume every day than the top 10 stock exchanges in the world combined, which amounts to ~200 billion customer opportunities daily. To accelerate these changes, MediaMath partnered with AWS and CloudCheckr to turbo-charge their DevOps initiatives. Leveraging CloudCheckr’s unified cost and security management platform, MediaMath realized $2 million in cost savings in one year, allowing them to become the leading independent programmatic company for marketers.

Register here >> 

Did you know that you can watch past webinars on-demand? Visit the AWS Partner Webinar Series page to check out webinars from Evident.io, Trend Micro, Alert Logic, Splunk, Tableau Software, Informatica, and Threat Stack.

ClearScale, a Premier AWS Consulting Partner in the APN, has built a business helping customers across the globe take advantage of the many benefits of the AWS Cloud. Already an AWS Big Data, DevOps, Marketing & Commerce, and Mobile Competency Partner, the company recently became a launch partner for the AWS Migration Competency. ClearScale’s mission is to provide customers with a cloud solution unique to their business needs and objectives. The company has found great success in helping customers digitally transform on AWS, and today, we’d like to tell you about Samsung’s cloud journey, and the success the company’s Cloud Print division has found working with AWS and ClearScale.

A Strategic Vision for the Cloud

For more than 70 years, Samsung has been dedicated to building a better world through technology. Samsung is a global leader in mobility, enabling productivity for customers and partners. The company has built a reputation of quality and innovation that keeps it at the forefront of technology. To meet and exceed its own goals of innovation and delivery, the Samsung team saw a large need for strong infrastructure delivery capabilities and high talent software development. To fuel the increasing velocity of innovation, the Samsung team launched their initiative for building a Cloud Solutions Platform.

Samsung envisioned its Cloud Solutions Platform to deliver infrastructure with best in class innovation and a faster time to market; enabling further convergence of the Mobile and Traditional enterprise management and document workflows. In particular, the Samsung Cloud Print platform, which provides mobile cloud printing capabilities to office users and mobile workers, targets a gap in the market impacting many Small and Medium Business (SMB) customers, and aims to take advantage of the current cloud services and mobile printing trend.

ClearScale: Bringing in Expertise for Agile Development

As the Samsung team began to envision their Cloud Solutions Platform, they sought to identify a partner who could help bring their vision to fruition, and deliver robust infrastructure and cloud applications at hyper scale. “ClearScale has been a trusted partner of Samsung for several years, and was selected by the Solutions Innovation Group for this project,” explains Brent Richtsmeier, Vice President of Solutions Innovation Group at Samsung Research America.

“We started working with Samsung back in mid-2013,” says Pavel Pragin, CEO and CTO of ClearScale. “Key to Samsung’s requirement for the Cloud Solutions Platform was a modular approach that could support a hybrid deployment, with a replaceable cloud management component that could provide horizontal scalability and be replaced without additional application redevelopment. Samsung needed to develop a cloud infrastructure at the pace of agile development to maintain its leadership role in mobile products and services. Deployment automation and scalability to reduce their IT management overhead was one of the key requirements.” The biggest priority for Samsung was providing more cost-effective and reliable services to their customers. Some of the foundational technology decisions that played a large role in the strategic approach taken by ClearScale as the company worked to design Samsung’s infrastructure platform were:

• Horizontal scalability
• Open source implementation (where applicable)
• Vendor-neutral integration with a Cloud Management Platform

And as Pragin explains it, the foundational decisions needed to be coupled with the following technologies and practices:

• Rapid provision of new deployments (DEV, INT, QA, PROD, DR)
• Simplify solution application development effort
• Infrastructure-as-code practices
• Configuration management of core platform components
• Subsystem clustering
• Security configuration between subsystems
• Monitoring, alerting, and auto scaling
• Separate code and configuration

“One of the first steps was to design and test the new infrastructure platform for Samsung, based on their requirements and business goals,” continues Pragin. “Each new iteration brought new complex challenges that required steady innovation by our software team. Numerous technologies were deployed and evaluated for each layer of the solution. Performance was measured for each component and subsystem as well as detailed cost profiling to ensure the system was viable and provided a strong ROI.”

Why AWS?

The Samsung team chose to use AWS in its hybrid deployment for its applications because of its requirements for a robust cloud infrastructure, horizontal scalability, and open-source implementation. “AWS provides a highly reliable and comprehensive set of features that help Samsung achieve faster application performance, auto-scaling, reduce IT overhead, provide self-service and instant provisioning, security, compliance, and management features,” says Richtsmeier. “Additionally, AWS provides deployments globally, and enable compliance with the data compliance requirements in each region.”

Another key factor for the Samsung Cloud Print team? The maturity of the AWS partner ecosystem. “The breadth and depth of the AWS ecosystem combined with constant innovation is important to us. We can pick and choose the best technology stack needed for our applications,” explains Richtsmeier.

The Cloud Solutions Platform started with RightScale as the cloud management engine, providing portability between cloud infrastructures, while capitalizing on the unique capabilities and cost benefits of each. In the early stages of the project, the RightScale templates developed had to be cloud independent, as Samsung was planning to reuse them for a variety of projects that could be deployed on AWS, other cloud platforms, or on-premises.

As Samsung iterated through development, additional requirements for analytics, monitoring, and high availability were added to the platform. ClearScale deployed an ELK stack (Elasticache, Logstash, Kibana) for additional Samsung Cloud Print and Device Monitoring features. The architecture was then further refined and automated with AWS CloudFormation / AWS OpsWorks and Chef to minimize cost and deliver efficient automation and scalability.

Today, Samsung uses the following AWS services in its Samsung Cloud Print solution:

• AWS CloudFormation was used for initial deployment and allows SCP components to be deployed via AWS CloudFormation templates as Amazon EC2 instances, as well as deploying OpsWorks stacks.
• AWS OpsWorks, with its excellent UI, is used for configuration management.
• Amazon VPC is used to enhance security and provide the ability to use additional network features like customized routing.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is used to store app data, config files, scripts and AWS CloudFormation templates.
• AWS IoT is currently in proof of concept stage as MQTT server for Samsung Cloud Print Solution.

Other AWS Services used include: VPN and AWS Direct Connect, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Route 53, and Amazon ElastiCache.

“ClearScale delivered the AWS-based cloud infrastructure at the pace of agile development, shortening overall time to market for Samsung Cloud Print,” says Richtsmeier. “Automated infrastructure deployment at cloud-scale reduced Samsung’s IT management overhead and provided faster, more cost effective and highly reliable services. This allows Samsung to maintain a competitive edge in the marketplace and offer the innovative Cloud Print platform to the SMBs around the globe.”

What’s Next?

As it continues to evolve its Cloud Solutions Platform on AWS, the Samsung team is now beginning to experiment with what is possible using AWS IoT, through a proof of concept (PoC) delivered by ClearScale.

“Our device-to-device communication capability for our Cloud Print application is currently in a proof of concept stage. Scalability tests using JMeter have demonstrated the ability to handle 500,000 simultaneous devices on AWS IoT with excellent throughput. Cloud printing services between mobile devices and the print nodes demonstrate a high customer value use case for IoT. This was further enhanced with the launch of the Amazon Dash Replenishment Service (DRS) which enabled toner delivery, and Samsung Printer Diagnostic Services, which requires infrastructure that is common in IoT applications. We plan to launch additional services connecting printers and Samsung devices in fall of 2016,” says Richtsmeier.

With help from AWS and ClearScale, Samsung can benefit from highly scalable, cost-effective, and reliable services, reduce its IT overhead, and focus on the Cloud Solution Platform, while maintaining a competitive edge in the SMB marketplace.

Want to read more about how ClearScale worked with Samsung? Visit the ClearScale blog. You can learn more about ClearScale here.

Are you looking for an efficient way to sell your software to U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) customers on AWS?

Today, we announced the launch of AWS Marketplace for the U.S. IC, an isolated and distinct implementation of AWS Marketplace. There are a number of benefits to listing your products in the AWS Marketplace for the U.S. IC that Jeff Barr outlined on the AWS Blog, including:

• Greater access to a new market that may not have been visible or accessible to you before;
• A more efficient approach to selling to the U.S. Intelligence Community, without lengthy contract negotiations;
• The ability to take advantage of your existing knowledge of AWS, packaging tools, and processes you already have in place to prepare the release of your product for use in AWS Marketplace; and
• Assistance to create cleared support engineers. In order to support this community, your software will need to be accredited. This requires cleared support engineers. Through Amazon’s Innovation Center initiative, AWS is assisting those listing in the AWS Marketplace for the U.S. IC with the creation of two cleared support engineers.

AWS Marketplace for the U.S. Intelligence Community represents a great opportunity for you to reach this unique customer base, and we’d like to help you get started.

What Are the Publisher Requirements to Sell on AWS Marketplace for the U.S. Intelligence Community?

There are a few steps you need to take in order to become a seller on AWS Marketplace for the U.S. Intelligence Community.

•  Your products must be available in the commercial AWS Marketplace.
•  You must submit a separate U.S. Intelligence Foreign Ownership Control and Influence (FOCI) adjudication package.
•  Ensure that your products work in the Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) space; this means that your products do not make any calls to the public Internet and do not attempt to access any external resources.

Want to Learn More?

If you are interested in listing your product on AWS Marketplace for the U.S. IC and want to request additional information, please contact icmp@amazon.com.

Head over to the AWS Public Sector blog for more information on the announcement.

Are you based in the India region? Would you like the opportunity to hear from AWS leadership, gain new skills and insights to develop your cloud practice on AWS, and connect with other APN Partners and AWS staff?

Join us for the 2nd annual AWS India Partner Summit, a free event exclusive to APN Partners, with sessions happening in Mumbai, New Delhi, and Bangalore!

What Can You Expect to Learn at the AWS India Partner Summit?

The AWS India Partner Summit offers you a fantastic opportunity to learn about the APN and the value of being an APN Partner, and to network with other APN Partners and AWS staff.

By attending the Partner Summit, you can:

• Learn from the successes of your peers and gain new skills and insights for developing a growing cloud practice with AWS
• Become armed with content that is tailored to your goals as a Consulting or Technology Partner
• Learn how to increase revenue with cloud-based products and services, gain a greater competitive advantage, and expand your business
• Attend sessions that will cover a wide range of topics relevant to business leaders at Partner organizations

Locations

The AWS Partner Summit session will be held in the following cities:

Mumbai | 28th June 2016

Time: 8:00am – 5:50pm
Venue: Bombay Convention & Exhibition Centre Nesco Compound, Off Western Express Highway, Goregaon East, Opp. Mahananda Dairy, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400063, India

New Delhi | 29th June 2016

Time: 8:00am – 4:00pm
Venue: JW Marriott Hotel New Delhi Aerocity
Asset Area 4, Hospitality District, Delhi, Aerocity, Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi, Delhi 110037, India

Bangalore | 1st July 2016

Time: 8:00am – 4:00pm
Venue: The Taj West End Hotel
Racecourse Road Bangalore, Karnataka 560001, India

To view the agenda for each location, click here.

Registration

To register for the AWS India Partner Summit, click here for registration information on the right.

Follow Along with Us During the Event!

We’ll be live tweeting from each city from the @AWS_Partners Twitter handle – we’ll be using the #AWSPartnerSummit hashtag throughout the event, and we encourage you to do the same!

Workload migration is a key milestone of the customer journey on AWS, and helping customers map out a clear and comprehensive migration strategy is a top priority in which AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners can provide enormous support. But customers need guidance to ensure they’re connecting with the right AWS Partners who’ve proven they have a strong AWS practice, have demonstrated customer success, and have demonstrated technical proficiency throughout the different phases of migrations.

Making sure the right AWS Partners are highlighted to customers and making it easy for customers to connect with these partners is the ultimate goal of the AWS Competency Program. Attaining an AWS Competency allows you, as an AWS Partner with specific expertise, to differentiate yourself to customers by showcasing this expertise.

We currently have AWS Competencies across a number of specific solution areas (including DevOps, Big Data, and Security, to name a few) and today, I’m excited to announce the launch of our newest AWS Competency, the AWS Migration Competency.

Announcing the AWS Migration Competency

AWS Migration Competency Partners provide solutions or have deep experience helping businesses move successfully to AWS, through all phases of complex migration projects, discovery, planning, migration and operations.

These partners focus on developing their customer’s internal skills and helping to build the foundations required for executing complex migrations to AWS. They are experts in reducing friction when migrating legacy applications.

The AWS Partner Competency Program has validated that the AW Partners below have demonstrated that they can help customers of all sizes migrate applications and legacy infrastructure to AWS.

Categories and Launch Partners

Migration Delivery Partners – Help customers throughout every stage of migration, accelerating results by providing personnel, tools, and education in the form of professional services. These partners either are, or have a relationship with an AWS audited Managed Service Provider with expertise in helping customers with ongoing support of AWS workloads.

Launch Partners:

• 2nd Watch
• Accenture
• Classmethod, Inc.
• ClearScale
• Cloud Technology Partners
• cloudpack
• Cloudreach
• Cognizant Technology Solutions
• CorpInfo
• CSC
• FPT Software
• Infosys
• Logicworks
• REAN Cloud
• Serverworks
• Slalom Consulting
• Smartronix

Migration Consulting Partners – Provide expertise and training to help enterprises quickly develop specific capabilities or achieve specific outcomes. They provide consulting services to enable adoption of DevOps practices, to modernize applications, and implement solutions.

Launch Partners:

• Apps Associates
• Aquilent
• Datapipe
• Flux7
• Pythian
• TriNimbus

Migration Technology for Discovery & Planning – Discover IT assets across your application portfolio, identify dependencies and requirements, and build your comprehensive migration plan with these technology solutions.

Launch Partners:

• Atadata
• Cloudamize
• RISC Networks

Migration Technology for Workload Mobility – Execute migrations to AWS by capturing your host server, configuration, storage, and network states, then provision and configure your AWS target resources.

Launch Partners:

• Racemi
• CloudEndure
• Atadata

Migration Technology for Application Profiling – Gain valuable insights into your applications by capturing and analyzing performance data, usage, and monitoring dependencies before and after migration.

Launch Partners:

• New Relic
• AppDynamics
• Dynatrace

A High Bar for Partners – Migration Competency Requirements

To ensure we are recommending top AWS Partner Migration solutions, we’ve set a high bar for AWS Partners who wish to attain the Competency.

For example, both AWS Consulting and Technology Partners must provide at least five AWS customer references specific to completed AWS Migration projects of 10 applications or more. AWS Migration Consulting Partners must have at least 10 AWS Certifications in total, including at least two Professional Level AWS Certifications, and Migration Delivery Partners must have at least 30 AWS Certifications in total, including at least eight Professional Level AWS Certifications.

AWS Technology Partners must be able to support their migration product or solution in three or more AWS Regions, meet AWS Security Best Practices, offer professional services to support usage, and provide a licensing model that allows for utility consumption, along with a number of additional requirements.

You can view all of the requirements to apply for the AWS Migration Competency here.

Hear From Three of Our Launch Partners 

We asked a few of our launch partners to tell us about what they’ve experienced as they’ve helped enterprise customers migrate to AWS. Take a look:

Cloud Technology Partners (CTP)

REAN Cloud

Slalom

Want to learn more about the value of the AWS Migration Competency for customers? Visit my colleague Stephen Orban’s Enterprise blog here. Read Jeff Barr’s blog on the launch here.

If you’re an APN Partner interested in the AWS Competency Program, click here to learn more. To apply for the AWS Migration Competency, log in to the APN Portal, update your Partner Scorecard, click on Apply for AWS Competencies (under My APN Account), and submit your application.

Headquartered in Laurel, MD, Aquilent is a leading solution provider of Digital Services, DevOps, and the full range of cloud services exclusively for the federal government. With an emphasis on DevOps, Aquilent offers customers a full range of federal cloud solutions that leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) through every level of engagement. The company has been an AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner since 2009 and is a Premier APN Consulting Partner, Authorized Government Reseller, AWS Government Partner Program member, and an AWS Managed Service Partner.

Since its inception, Aquilent has been on a mission to be at the forefront of technological innovation on behalf of its wide base of federal customers. Early on, the company quickly acknowledged the cloud as the future of digital transformation for the federal space. In 2009, Aquilent moved its corporate infrastructure and back office applications to AWS, and its corporate data center was completely dismantled. “It became clear to Aquilent in 2009 that AWS was going to be a leader for federal customers in public cloud; and we wanted to start working with AWS as early as we could to build our business around the platform,” says Mark Pietrasanta, Chief Technology Officer at Aquilent. “Originally, we engaged with other cloud providers, but we recognized the AWS pricing model and feature set to be better suited, in our opinion, to the federal government space.”

“Working with AWS has transformed what we provide to our customers,” says Pietrasanta. “We’ve always thrived in the digital services and application development space, but our ability to leverage AWS in order to provide customers with a full end-to-end solution has transformed the type of work we do for customers and has transformed Aquilent as a company, allowing us to specialize and help our customers evolve into Agile, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Deployment, and DevOps.” Aquilent has seen significant business growth on AWS, experiencing cloud growth of 566% over the last year.

Aquilent continues to grow as an AWS Partner, having recently passed the stringent third-party audit required of Partners wishing to become a part of the AWS Managed Service program. “Our acceptance into the program highlights our advanced offerings in the cloud managed services space, which includes the tools necessary to deliver continuous innovation around security, DevOps, proactive monitoring, and streamlined management of customer environments,” says Pietrasanta. “This is very relevant to federal customers who often require a higher-touch given the complexity of their environments and strict security requirements.”

 Read the full Aquilent AWS Partner case study here >>