AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

At AWS, we believe distributed ledger technology (DLT) such as blockchain can help customers simplify transactions and conduct efficient, secure interactions with different parties around the globe. Fortunately, the large and growing APN blockchain community shares our passion for putting customers first and driving innovation. Together, we are setting out to discover how blockchain solutions on AWS can address customer pain points and enable new ways of doing business.

We are excited to announce the launch of seven Exam Readiness Courses to help you prepare for AWS Certification. These courses complement our technical training courses and focus on helping you to validate your technical expertise. We’ll teach you how to interpret exam questions, apply concepts being tested by the exam, and allocate your study time. You’ll also have a chance to work through sample questions to understand the rationale behind correct and incorrect answer choices.

To receive the AWS Competency designation, APN Partners must undergo rigorous technical validation and assessment of the security, performance, and reliability of their AWS solutions. To help APN Consulting Partners better understand this process and our validation requirements, we are releasing new versions of the AWS Competency Validation Checklists. The checklists highlighted in this post are for APN Consulting Partners, who in many cases undergo technical validation through ISSI, a third-party auditor.

ConsenSys is an APN Advanced Technology Partner that is enabling consortiums—that is, associations of two or more companies—to launch and operate enterprise blockchain networks on AWS without spending months and millions of dollars writing custom code. Kaleido Blockchain Business Cloud platform is the first managed blockchain SaaS available on AWS Marketplace and takes customers all the way from concept to consortium.

There is no one-size-fits-all for mainframe modernization to AWS. Depending on the business and IT strategy, customers select the most suitable pattern for them. If the mainframe is large enough to process multiple workloads, the characteristics can favor different patterns. Fortunately, based on our experience from successful customer modernization projects to AWS, we have identified patterns, lessons learned, and best practices that facilitate new mainframe-to-AWS initiatives.

Liberating data from enterprise silos poses an uphill challenge for most IT organizations. The process usually involves backup of production databases, lift-and-shift migration to a cloud environment, provisioning of cloud resources, and validation of imported data. By utilizing AWS to maintain and manage the unified data fabric, Delphix Dynamic Data Platform accelerates cloud adoption and is a cornerstone during an organization’s migration to cloud-native and hybrid cloud deployments.

While many aspects of app development and deployment on AWS have been streamlined, authentication of end-users into apps remains challenging. In this post, Centrify highlights a new method of authenticating users into your mobile and web applications using the Application Load Balancer feature of Elastic Load Balancing using Centrify as an OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity provider. Centrify is an APN Advanced Technology Partner.

Kubernetes is an open-source platform to automate deploying, scaling, and operating application containers. But in itself, Kubernetes is not enough to achieve this goal. To fully empower our engineers, we need to build a CI/CD pipeline around Kubernetes. Using this tutorial from APN Partner Slalom Consulting, we have built a Kubernetes cluster with a good set of security defaults and then wrapped a simple CI/CD pipeline around it.

Hyperledger Sawtooth is an enterprise blockchain platform for building distributed ledger applications and networks. Built by Intel, Sawtooth simplifies blockchain application development by separating the core system from the application domain. Application developers can specify the business rules appropriate for their application, using the language of their choice, without needing to know the underlying design of the core system. Sawtooth validators can be run from pre-built Docker containers and launched on AWS.

In many retail environments, SAP Hybris Commerce is deployed into production in what could best be described as a traditional way. Some organizations have opted to migrate SAP Hybris Commerce to the cloud, but have done so through “lift and shift” methods. Piksel Retail, a Piksel Group company, created the Digital Commerce Channel (DC2) to address these challenges. DC2 is their SAP Hybris-based e-commerce solution, deployed on AWS. Piksel Group is an APN Advanced Consulting Partner.

Despite advances in music-sharing technology, touring and live shows remain staples for emerging artists. How do artists and promoters align the reach of streaming services with fans’ physical locations to better plan, promote, and manage live shows? To answer this question, Vertical Trail partnered with Gigable to create a music platform and app that uses curated playlists, geo-based concert discovery, and online ticketing to close the gap between artists and their fans—all while building a formidable big data asset.

H2O is an open source data machine learning platform that provides a flexible, user-friendly tool to help data scientists and machine learning practitioners. It was created by H2O.ai, an APN Advanced Partner with the AWS Machine Learning Competency. In this post, we look at setting up an H2O cluster, import data from Amazon S3, create an AWS Lambda deployment package from the model, and finally deploy a RESTful endpoint. Following these steps, you can migrate your H2O Flows to AWS in about 10 minutes.

While a managed Kubernetes offering provides a tremendous business advantage for time-to-market when deploying new applications, customers still need to think about securing their applications. In this post, we explore how APN Advanced Technology Partner Tigera and their Tigera Secure Cloud Edition (CE) helps ensure your containerized applications running in Kubernetes are secure and auditable.

Manifold Technology has built a highly scalable, cost-effective, and easy-to-integrate blockchain platform that’s architected to deploy on AWS. Manifold lets you manage blockchains for any application, from branded currencies and settlement, to asset management and intelligent automation. The platform uses AWS Lambda to deliver a distributed ledger capability with blockchain auditability and the ability to detect possible tampering. Manifold is an APN Standard Technology Partner.