Amazon Web Services (AWS) Inc. announced Tuesday a number new ways it will invest in its partner community in the coming months.
Terry Wise, AWS channel chief, spoke at the keynote address of the AWS Global Partner Summit. He stated that the company is on track to double its investment in AWS Partner Network (APN). This fulfills a promise it made last year to partners at the Partner Summit. The Partner Summit marks this week’s start of AWS reInvent, the annual conference that takes place in Las Vegas.
Wise, AWS’ vice-president of alliances and channels announced three new APN competencies during his keynote: DevOps (Migration), and Internet of Things. According to this APN blog post, the DevOps competency is available to partners who “provide solutions to, and have deep experience working alongside businesses to help them implement continuous Integration and delivery patterns or helping them automate their infrastructure provisioning with configuration management tools on AWS.”
Wise stated that the IoT and Migration competencies are still being developed but will be “coming soon”. According to an AWS press release, the IoT competency targets “partners that offer IoT platforms and analytics, connectivity infrastructures, developer tools, operating system software, and vertical-focused IoT solution solutions.” The migration competency, on the other hand, is for “partners that have deep expertise and experience in helping customers migrate entire data centers and applications to AWS.”
Andy Jassy (AWS senior vice president) highlighted the migration opportunity to partners during his section. He stated that there is a huge opportunity for SIs (systems integrators) to assist enterprises with migration managed service.
Wise also announced two new training and certification resources to help APN partners improve their security skills. The first is an online course called “AWS Security Basics” and the second is a three-day lab called, “Security Operations on AWS”. In a blog post, Wise stated that the two offerings are “designed to help you and/or your customers meet cloud security goals under the AWS Shared Responsibil Model, including guidance on how create more secure AWS solutions and architectures and address key compliance requirements.”
Wise stated that AWS will also launch a new service called EC2 Dedicated Hosting, but he didn’t specify a timeline beyond “soon.” Wise stated that EC2 Dedicated hosts would allow organizations to bring their own server licenses, whether they are Windows, Linux, or Oracle, on dedicated AWS EC2 hosts.
“If you are migrating to AWS from an existing environment, you may have purchased volume licences for software that can be used on a server with a specific number of sockets and physical cores. You may also be required to run the software on a particular server for a certain time. This requirement is often included in licenses for Windows Server, Windows SQL Server and Oracle Database. AWS evangelist Jeff Barr wrote this blog post. “We want to ensure that you continue to benefit from these licenses even after you migrate to AWS.”
Wise also shared some statistics that illustrate the growth of APN during the keynote. He said that there are approximately 1 million AWS customers around the world and “tens to thousands” of APN partner, with more than half of those partners being located outside North America. The AWS Marketplace has over 2,300 products from more than 800 ISVs. He said that the SaaS Partner Program, which was launched in July, already has “hundreds” of partners.
