AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

This is a guest post from Jason Deck, SVP of Strategy at Premier AWS Consulting Partner and AWS Managed Service Partner Logicworks. 

The team at Logicworks believes that great cloud infrastructure begins with two key components: a robust, dynamic cloud platform like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a custom-built automation framework that controls, scales, secures, and deploys infrastructure resources. AWS provides the reliable, secure, and innovative services to power your applications; and your automation framework — which is architected using tools offered by AWS and AWS Technology Partners — supports agile deployment processes, security controls, and cost efficiencies that create value for your business.

What is a Cloud Automation Framework?

Cloud automation is a broad term that can refer to any piece of software that reduces manual infrastructure engineering effort and simplifies cloud operations. In essence, it is code that controls infrastructure.

In the old world, the only way to control infrastructure and make a system more reliable or secure was to throw more people and dollars at the problem. More people to monitor things like CPU utilization and manually secure sensitive data; more dollars to buy better hardware, live backups, IDS, etc. If you want to upgrade a large, enterprise-grade system, you are going to need a lot of people and dollars.

All of this changes as you take advantage of AWS. If you want to improve reliability of your workloads, you should program your environment in new ways and rely on an automated failover system to improve SLAs. We believe that the smartest way to automate your cloud is to develop a single set of tools within a management “hub” — defined by a single, central framework — that is used to design, build, deploy, and change a system. This is most often composed of three central components:

• Infrastructure automation: Infrastructure is structured and built into templates, where it can be versioned and easily replicated for future environments. Tools: AWS CloudFormation, GitHub
• Deployment automation: Code deployment processes are integrated with cloud-native tools, improving deployment velocity and reducing manual effort (and error). Tools: AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Lambda, Puppet, Chef, Jenkins
• Self-healing/auto-correcting/self-monitoring: Configuration management scripts and monitoring tools catch anomalies and proactively correct failed/misconfigured resources. Tools: AWS Lambda, AWS Config, AWS Inspector, AWS CloudTrail, Puppet, Chef, Jenkins

These three core elements are, in our opinion, the foundation of a robust infrastructure automation framework.

Together, this framework forms the bedrock of cloud infrastructure that is resilient, costs less to maintain, and allows engineering resources to be devoted to revenue-generating products, not infrastructure maintenance. Let’s dive into each of these benefits with some customer examples.

Horizontal Scalability / High Availability Architecture

AWS provides infrastructure resources that can scale up and down to meet demand or respond to failure; your automation framework must provide the rules that define when and how this occurs. Here is what this looks like in practice.

A global enterprise that provides backup, business continuity, and data analytics software and services to a large number of the Fortune 500 currently works with Logicworks to automate and manage its AWS infrastructure. The company’s development team wanted to be able to terminate instances with outdated code rather than update them, so that every code push is a rebuild of the entire stack. This means that no instance in project’s environment lasts for longer than 24 hours, and over the course of a single week, hundreds of instances must be terminated and rebuilt without any human intervention.

Disposable infrastructure requires full automation of the environment from AWS resource provisioning to bootstrapping, package installation, and code deployment. The Logicworks Sr. Engineering team first built a custom CloudFormation template that performs standard tasks like building and configuring a VPC and access controls. Then the Puppet agent is installed and connects to the Puppetmaster, which then configures the OS of the instance. The final step in the Puppet process is kicking off their custom deploy script, which pulls down the most recent version of code from an on-premises box.

By automating (and unifying) infrastructure build-out and code deployment, the global software company was able to create an immutable architecture with a 0.001% instance failure rate and 100% uptime for their production application. Rather than sending a failure alert to a human who would then manually correct the problem, the Logicworks team put in the work upfront to automate self-correction. “Failure” is such a routine part of their deployment process that it occurs with zero impact or human intervention.

Secure, Self-Correcting Resources

AWS provides world-class physical datacenter security. AWS also provides a number of tools to make it easier and cheaper to encrypt data everywhere, implement firewalls, etc. But it is your responsibility to configure, deploy and maintain these resources in a way that protects your data; this is known as the Shared Responsibility Model, which you can learn more about here. The same cloud automation framework we have been describing has a number of security benefits — and represents a system that is not just “protected”, but secure by design.

Logicworks recently worked with an organization that provides security training to engineering professionals around the world. As a security-focused company, they were looking for a Managed Service Partner with advanced security expertise to protect their new AWS environment. Logicworks created AWS infrastructure can be controlled programmatically, so that their security and compliance parameters are just pieces of code, capable of being changed more flexibly, versioned in Git like any piece of software, and automated to self-correct errors. This resulted in the following security benefits:

• Central control: We built infrastructure in templates using AWS CloudFormation, so the company’s “ideal” state is defined and can be repeated for multiple projects. This creates uniformity across projects, and ensures that new environments have standard elements, like VPC design, AWS CloudTrail enabled, MFA on root, etc.
• Improved transparency: They know exactly how every system is configured for security at any point in time, due to configuration management.
• Efficiency: They have reduced the time and cost of deploying future systems; they do not have to rebuild security configurations or get them approved by security teams when they are “built in” to templates and bootstrapping scripts.
• Reduced manual security work: By centrally managing configuration, they discourage ad hoc work; any change made directly to the instance and not to the script will be overwritten when your configuration management tool runs anyway.
• Simplified patching: Patches can be distributed across every system rapidly and with a complete audit trail of what was patched where.
• Happy auditors: The company can tell them exactly how your system is configured, critical compliance features like log monitoring and archival are included by default.

When systems are complex, there must be an equally powerful set of management tools and processes to enforce and maintain configurations. The set of practices described above, which are sometimes called DevSecOps or security automation or security by design, ensure that your ideal state is defined and maintained.

Cost-Efficient IT

Perhaps the most significant benefit of AWS and an automation framework is efficiency. The model described above does not just cut resource costs, it takes advantage of all AWS resources to deliver greater productivity and efficiency at scale.

Our team helped perform an audit of a large internet news organization’s 3-year-old AWS environment. While they employed cloud engineers on staff, those engineers were busy supporting code releases and putting out fires. This left them little time to update their environment with new AWS features or best practice configurations. As a side note, we find that this is often what can happen when a “DevOps” engineering team is tasked with doing everything quickly — but not given the time/resources to develop/outsource an automation framework that reduces manual maintenance and deployment work.

Our preliminary audit of the news organization’s AWS environment revealed that about 20% of their compute resources were being wasted due to poor tracking. Another 15% of the instances could not be linked back to an active project. They had over-engineered VPCs and were still manually launching and updating instances, which meant each instance had different configurations based on which engineer launched the instance.

Automation could solve this team’s problems in a number of ways:

1. Cost Tracking: Infrastructure automation in AWS CloudFormation can include a tagging policy to track resources and associated engineers/projects/teams. This eliminates manual (or nonexistent) tracking of expenses to associated projects.
2. Productivity: Second, the automation framework as a whole significantly reduced the amount of time that the team spends configuring instances and deploying new infrastructure, an enormous potential gain in engineer efficiency. A recently released report by Puppet found that high performing IT teams — that prioritize automation, high deployment velocity, and the “work not done” principle — spend 22% less time on unplanned work and rework than low-performing IT teams.
3. Other Instance Types: Fully-automated infrastructure may also allow the team to take advantage of AWS Spot Instances more reliably. AWS Spot Instances are instances that you can “bid” on and receive a significant cost reduction; however, Spot Instances can be terminated any time the instance cost exceeds your bid. If you utilize Auto Scaling and automate your infrastructure to self-heal in case of failure, then a terminated Spot Instance will simply fail-over to a Reserved Instance or On-Demand Instance without human intervention.

It is true that automation itself takes time and money. It also takes expertise — the kind that can be hard to find. Yet infrastructure automation is the inflection point that jumpstarts an organization’s cost efficiency efforts. These factors make it an ideal service to outsource; it is a skills gap that enterprises are struggling to fill, and a non-disruptive place where Managed Service Providers can provide value without replacing internal DevOps efforts. A Next-Generation Managed Service Provider like Logicworks that has already developed proprietary infrastructure automation software is an ideal fit.

The Future of AWS + Automation, From Our Perspective

AWS has spent the last decade developing a platform that significantly reduces the manual, time-consuming maintenance of hardware, network, and storage, and enables infrastructure to be controlled via software. However, it is up to each company to develop the automation framework that orchestrates AWS services and the company’s unique applications and processes.

Cloud automation is what drives better availability, better cost management, better governance, better time-to-delivery. Rather than growing bigger teams or adding a hodgepodge of tools, building an automation framework gives you far greater benefit for less effort. So whether a company chooses to build an automation team in-house or outsource it to a next-gen service provider, it should be at the top of enterprises’ IT priority lists.

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.

NorthBay, an Advanced AWS Consulting Partner and AWS Big Data Competency Partner, focuses on helping organizations migrate from traditional fragile on-premises data warehouses to AWS – “Teaching Old Data New Tricks™”. We recently wrote about NorthBay and the company’s new partnership with Premier APN Consulting Partner Mobiquity, which you can read more about here.

Today, NorthBay published a guest post on the AWS Big Data Blog entitled, “How Eliza Corporation Moved Healthcare Data to the Cloud”. The post, written by Laxmikanth Malladi, Chief Architect at NorthBay, discusses NorthBay’s customer Eliza Corporation and provides a detailed walk-through of how NorthBay architected and implemented a data lake on AWS for Eliza.

Read the full post here >>

Cloud security is our top priority. And we take what we call a Shared Responsibility Model approach: we manage security of the cloud, while security in the cloud is the responsibility of the customer. To that end, we work with a number of APN Partners who provide security solutions that complement AWS services, and help customers fulfill their obligations within the Shared Responsibility Model. Today, we’d like to tell you a little about the journey of one of our AWS Security Competency Partners and Advanced IAM Partners, OneLogin.

Who is OneLogin?

OneLogin is an Advanced APN Technology Partner who provides identity and access management (IAM) for the entire AWS suite of services. OneLogin offers single sign-on, full directory integration, user provisioning, multi-factor authentication, and roles-based access management for AWS. The company’s mission is simple:

• Security: Help organizations optimize their security profile on AWS and all their applications via a cloud-based IAM solution. Promote identity and access management (IAM) best practices and industry open-source standards.
• IT Productivity: Make IT/Security teams and AWS administrators more productive with automation that streamlines identity management and security policy enforcement.
• End User Productivity: Make end-users more productive with secure access to all of the applications and systems they need to work quickly and collaboratively and the ability to use self-service tools for everyday issues, like password reset, rather than relying on IT.

OneLogin holds the AWS Security Competency, with a focus on Access & Control. The company became an APN Partner in 2015.

Why AWS?

OneLogin decided to switch from another provider and use AWS. The firm decided to use AWS and to become an APN Partner based on customer need, and what the firm saw as strong company alignment. “Now, more than ever, organizations are moving multiple (if not all) tools to the cloud for enhanced productivity and cost-savings. OneLogin encounters customers who are making the move to the cloud every day, but are still concerned about identity and access management across all applications,” says David Meyer, VP, Product and Online Business. “Managing the infrastructure, security, and user identities across multiple applications and systems can be a big task, and we felt that OneLogin on AWS could help squarely address this challenge.”

The team also had a desire to build strong joint messaging and a strong value proposition on AWS, to reach customers who had started, or were looking to start, a migration to AWS, and were looking to take advantage of the cloud and create secure applications. “As an IAM vendor in the age of massive cloud adoption, OneLogin encountered (and continues to encounter) AWS customers who are looking to implement both security and infrastructure best practices that will keep their team both cost and time efficient. When we became an APN Partner in 2015, we connected with teams at AWS to begin a dialogue about how to reach prospects looking to migrate to cloud, yet concerned about security. In 2016, we have worked with the AWS team to define and build new integration enhancements and also find new channels to communicate with the AWS community on how to securely and efficiently develop and manage your applications in the cloud,” says Meyer. One of the main benefits the OneLogin team has experienced since becoming an APN Partner includes collaboration and engagement with AWS sales, marketing, and technical team members.

OneLogin’s platform lives on AWS, and supports features including:

• Unified Directory integration (sync users between multiple corporate directories like Active Directory (AD), LDAP, GoogleApps, and more)
• SAML Single Sign-on (SSO)
• Automated User Provisioning Engine, including multi-account and multi-role identity management. This allows admins to apply least-privileged policies for AWS by only allowing users to sign in with the appropriate set of permissions, nothing more.
• Enable customizable security policies such as multifactor authentication (MFA), based on user attributes, IP address, and more.

The AWS Security Competency

As OneLogin continued to grow on AWS, the team began to explore the most effective way to differentiate their offering to customers. Passing the rigorous qualifications to become one of a handful of AWS Security Competency Partners provided OneLogin with a unique opportunity. “OneLogin has dedicated significant time and resources to ensure we have a best-in-breed integration with AWS that allows customers to successfully manage user roles and permissions, streamline access management, and provide secure access. OneLogin became an AWS Security Competency Partner to demonstrate we meet the high security and technical standards of AWS,” says Meyer. “By participating in the approval process, we communicate to customers that we are a top tier AWS Security Partner that adheres to security best practices and provides a solution that complements AWS products and services.”

Do you want to learn more about OneLogin’s solution on AWS? Check out this recent blog post from the team that walks you through the solution, and how you can get started.

Ready to get started using OneLogin on AWS? Click here.

The AWSome Day Online Conference is an online training event that will provide a step-by-step introduction to  core AWS services for compute, storage, database and networking.

With a focus of enabling and educating attendees, AWS technical trainers will explain key features and use cases, share best practices, walk through technical demos, and be available to answer your questions one-on-one. The 4 hour training encompasses 5 modules, live Q&A, technical demos.

An attendee who completes the 5 modules will receive a certificate of attendance.

Through the AWSome Day Online Conference, we strive to:

• Provide a step-by-step guide on how to begin your journey on the AWS Cloud.
• Enable attendees across APAC with the opportunity to attend the online session, which will be made available on-demand for 5 days.

Event Details

Date: October 18, 2016

Time: 10.00am – 2.00pm Singapore

Registration

To register, click here.

This is a guest post from Barbara Kessler, MSP Business Development Manager, AWS

The widespread adoption of AWS and the corresponding shift from traditional on-premises data centers to hyperscale cloud solutions has created a significant new paradigm for managed service providers (MSPs). Customers are becoming increasingly aware of the value of cloud services. With this heightened awareness comes the desire to partner with providers who can guide them toward innovative business solutions and high performance environments. What we’ve observed is that customers are looking toward dynamic, business outcome focused solutions. We believe that the service providers best positioned to deliver this are those who have built or revamped their businesses to enable their customers to take advantage of cloud native functionality and who are able to deliver a full customer engagement lifecycle: plan/design >> build/migrate >> run >> optimize.

Today, I’d like to walk you through shift that we’ve observed from on-premises managed services to cloud managed services, and what we feel it takes to be successful as a Next Generation MSP. This post kicks off a new monthly series on Next Gen Hyperscale Cloud Managed Service.

The shift from on-premises

The shift from on-premises to cloud has opened new doors for Next Gen MSPs to create high value solutions and to uniquely position themselves as trusted advisors to their customers through their full lifecycle capabilities.

“Your mess for less” >> Design, architect, automate

The traditional role of an MSP has emphasized the running and operating of existing environments, but this, in our opinion, is no longer the right model for AWS customers. As customers become more experienced and knowledgeable in their use of these services, they are moving beyond just the most obvious benefits of using the AWS Cloud, and are looking for experts to help them optimize for the cloud to unlock agility and innovation in their business. These customers are looking for MSPs with deep expertise to consult, then design and implement highly automated and intelligent solutions, and continue to ensure that those solutions deliver an outstanding experience on an ongoing basis. We find that customers are looking for a provider who can individually manage their full experience.

Hardware-based solutions >> Software/Cloud-based solutions

MSPs are no longer tied to hardware-based solutions with capacity planning needs and lengthy equipment refresh cycles. Next Gen MSPs are instead approaching their customers’ needs with a cloud first strategy. They understand that the value of AWS expands well beyond the early dialogue about cost savings and CapEx versus OpEx, and they are focused on delivering rich solutions that allow their customers to leverage the full advantages of the AWS Cloud to rapidly meet the needs of their businesses.

Centralized operations >> Distributed operations and resources

The operational needs of Next Gen MSPs has also evolved significantly from the earlier days of the fishbowl style NOC, staffed with a centralized team, or even onsite resources at a customer’s location or data center. They are moving away from a management-by-exception approach, with significant requirements for human intervention when an issue arises, to a truly proactive approach with cloud native solutions that are well designed from the start. These solutions are highly automated and increasingly self-healing. When manual processes are needed, these MSPs are able to implement fixes by manipulating code from any location where they can access the internet. This is a significant value to the MSP, who has reduced staffing needs and complexities, as well as to the end customer whose resolution is achieved more rapidly.

Device-based SLAs >> Solution/Application-based SLAs

Traditional MSP SLAs have been focused on the performance of hardware and infrastructure,  as well as data accessibility and support response times. This changes in a cloud-based model, as AWS manages the underlying infrastructure. Next-gen MSPs are instead able to create SLAs based on the performance of the application and the business outcomes which are best aligned with meeting the ultimate needs of their end customers.

Complex, manual change management >> DevOps – CI/CD

Change management has traditionally centered on capacity management, updates, and security, and has often included manual processes that were both time and resource intensive. Next Gen MSPs are adopting DevOps tools and practices that allow them to continually assess, implement, manage and track changes in exponentially faster timeframes. They are able to utilize infrastructure-as-code in place of manual hardware and resource deployment and possess a CI/CD skillset that their customers can leverage. This facilitates an accelerated speed to production, allowing MSPs to significantly improve their customers’ agility and deliver exceptional value.

Static monitoring with fixed thresholds >> Dynamic monitoring with anomaly detection

Monitoring is an area of significant evolution for Next Gen MSPs. Gone are the days of monitoring fixed thresholds in static environments. This approach addressed challenges of capacity planning, alerting of performance issues, and facilitation of root cause analysis. Well-designed cloud environments will leverage infrastructure as code to auto scale and self-heal, allowing infrastructure to be treated as a disposable resource. We are now in an era of dynamic, highly scalable environments with monitoring tools that leverage machine learning and predictive analytics to understand a customer’s environment and detect anomalies before performance is impacted. Top performing MSPs are embracing this approach and delivering significantly improved performance and intelligence to their customers.

Security risk mitigation >> Security by design

Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) no longer have exclusive purview in the outsourced management of security devices and systems. There is an increasing convergence of the role of the MSSP with that of the broader MSP in cloud-based and cloud-native environments. We find that customers expect their MSP to have strong security expertise and the ability (and experience) to meet the regulatory and compliance needs of their business – including reporting capabilities for continuous compliance. The Next Gen MSP is able to design customer solutions from the start to meet these needs, then implement and continually manage the workloads.

Outsourcing vendor >> Trusted advisor and partner

The paradigm shift in how Next Gen MSPs are evolving their businesses to address the needs of their customers and their ability to deliver in all phases of the customer engagement lifecycle has allowed them to move from being one of many outsourced vendors, supporting a finite portion of a solution. They are now able to move into a position of a truly trusted advisor who consults, designs, implements and takes ownership of the customer’s environments and experience. This allows the MSP and the customer to function as partners with long-term and rewarding engagement potential.

Differentiation/Conclusion

AWS customers are looking for cloud experts who understand their specific industry, their regulatory and compliance needs, their business needs, and their workloads. They need an MSP who can marry that understanding to a deep expertise in AWS, and deliver agile solutions to meet those needs. A Next Gen AWS MSP can deliver this full experience in a way that has been elusive in traditional models. The AWS Managed Service Provider Program has been designed to help APN Partners achieve this level of service capability. Additionally, we strive to highlight to our customers the APN Partners who can best deliver these well-rounded experiences.

I hope you enjoyed this overview of managed services in the hyperscale cloud. Future topics for our series include:

• DevOps in your Managed Service Practice
• Monitoring through Machine Learning and Anomaly Detection
• Continuous Compliance in the Cloud
• Evolving Business Practices for a Transitioning MSP
• Deep Dive on MSP Program Requirements
• The Value of the AWS MSP Audit

Don’t see a particular topic you’d like to have covered? Let me know. I invite your comments regarding additional topics you would like us to discuss.

With tens of thousands of Consulting and Technology Partners worldwide, the AWS Partner Network (APN) ecosystem delivers services and solutions that can help address a plethora of business needs for AWS customers. And more often than not, there is great synergy between the solutions delivered by different APN Partners. In my opinion, there isn’t much that proves more beneficial for our customers than when two APN Partners that have built successful businesses on AWS identify complementary areas of focus and come together to provide additional value to clients.

Today, I’m excited to tell you about the work that two top APN Consulting Partners, Premier APN Consulting Partner and AWS Mobile Competency Partner Mobiquity, and Advanced APN Consulting Partner and AWS Big Data and Mobile Competency Partner NorthBay, are doing together to help drive actionable insights from big data analytics for the Enterprise space.

Who is Mobiquity?

Mobiquity works with the Fortune 500 to deliver data-driven, digital innovation to customers, patients, and employees. The company provides end-to-end digital transformation services, from strategy to design to application development and managed support to optimization for solutions on AWS. Mobiquity is unique in that it addresses the user journey across all channels – including mobile, Alexa/voice technologies, IoT, and chatbots, to establish human touch in the digital world. Mobiquity leverages Enterprise data to tie the user back to the brand through personalization and drive business value, while the company’s support services ensure that the solution is sustainable.

Mobiquity has worked with AWS since 2011 and has been an APN Partner since 2013. The firm earned Premier APN Partner status in 2015. Mobiquity holds the AWS Healthcare, Life Sciences, and Mobile Competencies.

Who is NorthBay?

NorthBay is proud to be an AWS partner for 4+ years, having achieved both the AWS Big Data Competency as well as the AWS Mobile Competency. The firm focuses on helping organizations migrate from traditional fragile on-premises data warehouses to AWS – “Teaching Old Data New Tricks™.” In addition, NorthBay assists companies by architecting, designing, and implementing an entire cloud-based data pipeline solution that leverages key AWS and complementary offerings to craft an Enterprise-class cloud data platform that is scalable, secure, and enables data governance. The end result allows for business unit self-service, a dramatic reduction in IT-related costs, and cloud data platform scalability.

Why Work Together?

Both teams feel there are key considerations that, in working together and using AWS, they can help Enterprise clients address a number of areas:

• The Enterprise has an abundant number of data sources, often decentralized across multiple systems and in many states of cleanliness. These are often not immediately available to solve customer insight challenges.
• The customer experience may be in active development. In turn, it is generating new data streams that are not tied into a data warehouse, causing further decentralization.
• Enterprise organizations may find it difficult to pull all of their various data sets together for decision support, resulting in missed opportunities.
• Organizations have many stakeholders, each with different points of view on Enterprise data. Stakeholders need easy access to tailored views that are actionable.
• Customers are more heavily influenced by Right Time Experiences meeting their needs at the right time and on the right channel. Such experiences can likely only be produced once an organization has centralized and mastered its data.

To help solve some of these unique business challenges and deliver an optimal level of service to the Enterprise, Mobiquity and NorthBay have decided to partner together to leverage each firm’s unique capabilities and expertise. “By combining Mobiquity’s expertise in customer experience and NorthBay’s data engineering capabilities with the scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency of AWS, we seek to offer a unique blend of services to address near- and long-term pain points associated with today’s ever-increasing, ever-complex data,” says Jim Keller, Vice President, NorthBay.

“With an end goal of delivering Right Time Experiences, we are helping organizations leverage technology to develop deeper engagement with customers at the right time, on the right channel. Delivering these experiences requires an understanding of the customer, existing data sets, and the roadmap to new data sets. In doing so, we plan to help Enterprises unlock new opportunities, grow customer loyalty, increase revenue, and expand their market share,” explains Ty Rollin, Chief Innovation Officer, Mobiquity.

So, how will this work?

Mobiquity will present a story of innovation and engagement. This will lead to a solution driven by a customer insight platform running on AWS, for which NorthBay will act as the Enterprise data engineering team. The goal is to deliver an innovative program that delivers new and refined engagement channels (i.e. mobile, Facebook Messenger, and Alexa) and a data management platform that provides insights from existing Enterprise data, blended with new engagement details.

What’s Next?

With a number of joint go-to-market activities in-the-works, the two firms look forward to delivering solutions to new and existing clients alike. “We’re both dedicated to building out our existing capabilities to continuously benefit the collective effort,” says Jim.

You can read more about Mobiquity and NorthBay’s announcement here. To learn more about each company, visit Mobiquity at http://mobiquityinc.com and NorthBay at http://northbaysolutions.com.

Are you a Standard-tier or higher APN Consulting Partner, interested in learning how to help customers run Windows Server workloads in AWS?

AWS is running a series of Level 200-300 technical bootcamps for APN Consulting Partners. The goal of this training is to help you prepare to work with new and existing customers who are looking to run or are currently running Windows Server workloads in AWS. We find that many organizations are eager to migrate on-premises Windows workloads to the cloud. This constitutes a large opportunity for APN Partners, and this training will enable you to better design, migrate, deploy and manage Windows workloads in AWS. A working lunch is provided. Students must bring their own laptops to complete the hands-on labs during the class.

Our bootcamps will help you learn about running Windows Server in AWS, and relevant services, including Windows PowerShell, Remote Desktop Gateway, AWS Directory Service, Microsoft Active Directory, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS CloudFormation, and Amazon EC2 Run Command.

Bootcamp Agenda

*This schedule is subject to change.

Intended Audience

This is a Level 200-300 technical course intended for: Windows IT Pros, Architects, DBAs, and .NET Developers.

How to Register

Take a look at the following list of cities and dates to find a training time that works for you. Then, just click the hyperlink to go to the registration page. Note that you will need to log in to your APN Portal account. Registration is FREE, but seating capacity is limited.

• 4-Oct: Irvine
• 6-Oct: Atlanta
• 10-Oct: Chicago
• 11-Oct: Palo Alto
• 13-Oct: New York City
• 19-Oct: London
• 25-Oct: Boston
• 25-Oct: Seattle
• 26-Oct: Sao Paulo
• 2-Nov: Paris
• 3-Nov: London
• 10-Nov: Dallas
• 15-Nov: Berlin
• 16-Nov: Munich

We hope to see you there!

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.

We have 10 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

Seamless Visibility and Detection for the Cloud

September 20th, 2016  | 10:00 – 11:00 AM PST

Organizations need to apply security analytics to obtain seamless visibility and monitoring across both their on-premises and cloud environments. These challenges can be solved with comprehensive detection rules and behavioral analytics to ensure you detect potential threats. Join FireEye and AWS to learn how Threat Analytics Platform (TAP) helped unify a major U.S. financial company’s on-premises and cloud-based Security Operations Centers (SOCs) by providing a single, cloud-based solution for monitoring their hybrid IT environment.

Register here >>

Continuous Automation with Docker on AWS

September 20th, 2016 | 1:00 – 2:00 PM PST

Join ClearScale and AWS to learn how the San Jose Water Company worked with ClearScale to leverage Docker and the latest AWS DevOps tools including Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) and AWS CodePipeline, to deliver new app features faster, with lower overhead. Gaining a competitive edge in the modern business landscape often depends on delivering apps with small, quick changes that create faster time-to-market, with focused value for the end customer.

Register here >> 

Automated DevOps Workflows with Chef on AWS

September 21, 2016 | 10:00 – 11:00 AM PST

Staying competitive in a turbulent market requires more than traditional practices of manual tests and siloed development – it requires maintaining accurate, repeatable builds and predictable deployment times. Chef Automate gives you a single comprehensive workflow across your entire organization, allowing you to treat infrastructure as code and facilitates DevOps automation. In this webinar, we’ll cover some of the latest Chef integrations with AWS. Gannett, a leading media company and publisher of USA Today, will also join us to talk about how they build, test, and deliver over 400 cookbooks on AWS.

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Red Hat OpenShift: Optimize Developer Agility & App Delivery on AWS

September 22nd, 2016 | 9:00 – 10:00 AM PST

To keep up with the ever-growing demand of business, developers need to accelerate the process of concept-to-production, without compromising the integrity of their product. Overcoming this challenge requires a platform that empowers developers to consistently build, deploy and manage containerized services and applications, and do so with confidence. In this webinar, Nicholas Gerasimatos and David Duncan will discuss the different services that Red Hat OpenShift on AWS has to offer and why they have gained the trust of over 90% of Fortune 500 companies.

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Best Practices for Security Compliance on AWS

September 22nd, 2016 | 10:00 – 11:00 AM PST

Rackspace provides a comprehensive set of tooling and expertise on AWS that further unlocks your ability to secure your environment efficiently and cost effectively. The dynamic environment of data, applications, and infrastructure can be a large consideration for businesses trying to manage security while following compliance regulations. To mitigate these challenges, businesses need a scalable security solution to ensure their data is safe, secure, and stable. In this webinar, Brad Schulteis, Jarret Raim and Sai Reddy Thangirala will discuss the topic of security control requirements on AWS through the lens of three common compliance scenarios: HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and generalized security compliance based on the NIST Risk Management Framework.

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Develop a Custom Data Solution Architecture

October 18th, 2016 | 10:00 – 11:00 AM PST

Organizations that have vast amounts of data in legacy applications often experience difficulties delivering that data to business unit end-users. Register to learn how Eliza Corporation and Scholastic overcame this challenge by leveraging a Data Lake solution from NorthBay on AWS to optimize data analytics and provide greater visibility. AWS and NorthBay will give you an in-depth overview of how you can use a Data Lake in conjunction with your existing on-premises or cloud-based Data Warehouse.

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Security Innovations in the Cloud

October 19th, 2016 | 10:00 – 11:00 AM PST

In dynamic cloud environments, many organizations have a need to implement a unified threat management solution that enhances visibility across their workloads. Learn how REAN Cloud adopted Sophos Unified Threat Management (UTM) for increased simplicity, visibility, and security of their AWS workloads. Sophos is an Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network that provides a reliable, unified security solution capable of scaling to meet the agility and speed of the AWS Cloud. Join the upcoming webinar to hear Ben Butler from REAN Cloud, Bill Prout from Sophos, and Nick Matthews from AWS discuss security innovations on the AWS Cloud.

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Real-time Visibility at Scale with Sumo Logic

October 19th, 2016 | 1:00 – 2:00 PM PST

Legacy monitoring and troubleshooting tools can limit visibility and control over your infrastructure and applications. Organizations must find monitoring and troubleshooting tools that can scale with the volume, variety and velocity of data generated by today’s complex applications in order to keep pace with business demands. Our upcoming webinar will discuss how Sumo Logic helped Scripps Networks harness cloud-native machine data analytics to improve application quality and reliability on AWS.

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Streamline Identity Management & Administration on AWS

October 20th, 2016 | 10:00 – 11:00 AM PST

Okta is an integrated identity and mobility management service. Learn through customer use cases how Okta has helped various organizations connect employees to the cloud by leveraging services such as AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) and logging services like AWS CloudTrail. Register now for our upcoming webinar to learn how Okta can enable your organization to simplify the way employees connect, while increasing efficiency and keeping your IT environments secure.

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A Data Culture with Embedded Analytics in Action

October 20th, 2016 | 1:00 – 2:00 PM PST

Data-driven companies have a need to make their data easily accessible to those who analyze it. Many organizations have adopted the Looker application, LookML on AWS, a centralized analytical database with a user-friendly interface that allows employees to ask and answer their own questions to make informed business decisions. Join our webinar to learn how our customer, Casper, an online mattress retailer, made the switch from a transactional database to Looker’s data analytics program on Amazon Redshift.

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Did you know that you can watch past webinars on-demand? Visit the AWS Partner Webinar Series page to check out webinars here.

In an effort to help AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners showcase their customer obsession through AWS Certification achievement, we’ve launched APN Certification Distinctions. Historically, AWS Certifications have been an individual achievement. With APN Certification Distinctions, APN Partners will now have a chance to showcase how many active AWS Certifications their company has collectively achieved, providing additional ways to highlight the value AWS Certification brings to their customers.

APN Certification Distinctions will be distributed to qualified APN Partners in the following increments: 50, 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500. Certification data is collected via SFDC and will only count active AWS Certifications. If your company qualifies for this distinction, an APN representative will reach out to your company contact soon. Companies can showcase their distinction on their website, event kiosks, signage, customer emails, etc. Learn more about APN Certification Distinctions here.