Category: AWS IoT

The following is a guest post from Annabelle Anderson on the AWS Partner Marketing team. 

Regardless of if you’re looking to run a multi-channel marketing campaign or only need a few assets to enhance an existing campaign, APN Marketing Central can help you co-market your solutions on AWS. Available in the APN Portal for Standard-tier and higher APN Partners, APN Marketing Central provides you access to hundreds of solution-based marketing assets and a number of agencies who can help you execute more customized campaigns.

This month, we’re excited to announce the launch of two new campaigns, AWS IoT and AWS Security, and a new language, French. Check out these new campaigns by visiting the ‘Marketing’ tab in the APN Portal and clicking on ‘Launch a Campaign or Engage an Agency with APN Marketing Central’.

New Campaigns – AWS IoT & AWS Security

For each of these new campaigns, find nurture emails, landing pages, syndicated content, solution briefs, banner ads, social media posts and images, copy blocks, and case study templates that are ready to co-brand and launch as individual marketing assets or as a multi-touch integrated campaign. Access any of these campaigns under the ‘Execute Campaigns’ section of APN Marketing Central.

AWS IoT

With the help of the Internet of Things (IoT), organizations are gaining new insights that help them make more proactive decisions and achieve greater efficiency. Launch the new AWS IoT campaign to educate your prospects on the advantages of leveraging IoT and how your company can help them get started.

AWS Cloud Security

Cloud security at AWS is the highest priority. With this new campaign, inform your prospects how AWS and your company provide the tools, services, and resources to help keep their AWS workloads secure and compliant.

New Language – French!

APN Marketing Central is now available in French. Update your language settings in APN Marketing Central to view the platform in French and launch either the Big Data or Cloud Migration campaign. To change your language settings, click on “Choose your language” from the APN Marketing Central home page.

Getting Started

APN Marketing Central is available to Standard tier and above APN Partners via the Marketing tab of the APN Portal.

• Step 1: Log into the APN Portal
• Step 2: Click on ‘Marketing’ tab
• Step 3: Click on ‘Launch a Campaign or Engage an Agency with APN Marketing Central’ and you will be automatically signed into APN Marketing Central

Don’t know where to start? Virtual Partner Marketing Managers (vPMMs) are available to walk you through APN Marketing Central, answer any questions, and help you launch your first campaign. Trained and hired by AWS Partner Marketing, these vPMMs are here to assist you with your partner campaign needs. To request vPMM assistance, email awsvpmm@structuredweb.com.

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.

Last Friday, the AWS ASEAN partner team hosted the AWS Partner Summit – Singapore. The event was intended to provide partners with valuable insight into key trends on AWS, and to help partners to connect with both one another and with AWS team members. I was fortunate enough to be a part of the event, and had a great opportunity to connect with a number of consulting and technology partners from across the region. Similar to the Partner Summit – Sydney, the event featured guest speakers from AWS, APN member firms, and AWS customer firms.

Partner Keynote

Cam McNaught, Head of ASEAN Channels & Alliances kicked off the event. He was joined by Terry Wise, WW VP of Channels & Alliances, AWS, who spoke to partners about what we’ve seen to be some keys to partner success on AWS, which include:

• Build solutions to map to Competencies
• Become AWS Trained & Certified
• Bring solutions to AWS Marketplace
• Engage with field sellers
• Collaborate with other APN Partners 

Terry also discussed key trends representing a large opportunity for Partners on AWS, and Premier Consulting Partner BlazeClan took the stage to discuss a successful cloud migration the company completed for a large company in region.

Sessions

Three sessions were hosted across different topics:

• Succeeding with AWS by Delivering High Value Services, presented by Darren Thayre, AWS Professional Services
• Building a Big Data and Analytics Practice – Partner Opportunities with AWS, presented by Craig Stires, Head of Big Data and Analytics, APAC
• Beyond the Fridge: Every Thing Will Be Connected, presented by Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com

The sessions featured guest speakers from Seaco and Trax. One of my favorite quotes came from ‘Succeeding with AWS by Delivering High Value Services’, when Brandon O’Neill, Director of IT Services, Seaco, explained what the company was looking for in a partner: “We were looking for a mentor to help guide us onto the cloud”.

AWS Partner Recognition

The ASEAN team chose to recognize three APN Partners in three different categories: AWS Rising Star Partner, AWS Innovation Partner, and AWS Partner of the Year ASEAN 2015. Congratulations to the following APN Partners!

• AWS Rising Star Partner – Cloud Comrade Pte Ltd
• AWS Innovation Partner – Fusionex
• AWS Partner of the Year ASEAN 2015 – BlazeClan

Networking

I loved one of the main approaches the team took to bring partners together. Throughout the event, folks had the opportunity to grab coffee…but they couldn’t grab just a single coffee. Coffees were paired together, and partners were meant to grab two coffees and then ‘partner up’, share the coffees, and strike up a conversation. The team also set up networking booths in the main hall for partners to learn more about key AWS services and programs, including AWS Partner Marketing and AWS Training & Certification.

More Information

Did you miss the Partner Summit? We live tweeted the day from @AWS_Partners – follow us and re-visit the event minute-by-minute!

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, WW 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!

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.

Are you looking to gain deep, hands-on technical training for AWS NoSQL and IoT services?

We’re excited to announce a series of NoSQL and IoT technical workshops for APN Partners we’ll be delivering in Seattle on Feb 23rd – 24th, and Boston on March 29th – 30th. Intended for Advanced and Premier APN Partners who hold at least one AWS Competency, these workshops will be led by our AWS Solution Architecture (SA), AWS Business Development (BD), and AWS Partner Network (APN) teams.

What Will the Workshops Cover?

The NoSQL workshop will cover data lifecycle management and an overview of how customers are using NoSQL to meet business challenges.  Participants will learn how to create low-latency NoSQL databases through a deep dive into DynamoDB schema creation, tuning, and performance management, including caching with Elasticache.  In addition to DynamoDB best practices, we will also cover Cassandra and MongoDB on Amazon EC2 as well as tips to migrate from RDBMS to NoSQL databases.

The IoT workshop will cover an introduction to the IoT ecosystem including core IoT services including AWS IoT, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Amazon SNS, and Amazon SQS.  We will also include a deep dive and walkthrough of AWS IoT integration with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis, and AWS Lambda.  You will see demos of AWS IoT services with AWS Lambda + Amazon DynamoDB capture and AWS IoT Device Shadows, as well as participate in hands-on labs where you will set up your IoT device to capture data into Amazon DynamoDB using AWS IoT and Lambda.

Attendance at both workshops is not required but highly encouraged.

Who Should Attend?

We will be prioritizing seats for Advanced/Premier APN Partners who hold at least one AWS Competency. As both workshops will be technical, 400+ level, and hands-on, we encourage senior engineers to attend. There is no cost to attend these workshops. However, travel and related expenses must be covered by your firm.

What’s the Schedule?

Our first workshops will be hosted in Seattle and Boston, with more to come around the globe throughout 2016.

Seattle Workshops:

• February 23rd: AWS NoSQL
• February 24th: AWS IoT

Boston Workshops:

• March 29th: AWS NoSQL
• March 30th: AWS IoT

NoSQL Agenda:

IoT Agenda:

*please note that these agendas may be subject to change.

Interested in Attending?

If you’d like to learn more about the workshops, or would like to reserve a spot, please reach out to your Partner Development Manager.