AWS Competencies — How do they help partners?

Introduction

First, if you are planning to apply for an AWS Competency, Congratulations!

Attainment of an AWS Competency is a challenging task; however, by the end of the process and the attainment of the badge, you will have transformed your practice and processes.

Let’s see how Integra Technologies approached the Migration Competency application process, and how it helped improve our migration practice.

Getting ready for the application

The requirements for the various Competencies are well documented in the APN Portal. The various competencies that can be applied for are listed at https://aws.amazon.com/partners/programs/competencies/

Once the decision on which competency to apply for has been taken, the Validation Checklist (APN Login required) gives an outline of the technical criteria that the partner will be validated against to achieve the designation applied for.

It is recommended that you work with your Partner Development Manager (PDM) and Partner Solutions Architecture (PSA) right from the start and schedule a regular cadence; they can review your application status and give feedback as you progress through the application.

The requirements

In our case we had applied for the migration competency. As with all competencies, it had numerous initial requirements that had to be met before the application could be submitted.

These are (not an exhaustive list):

• Should provide details of four complex migration projects executed for four different customers.
• It can be migration projects or migrate and modernise projects.
• The migration project should have started within the last three years.
• Two of the four case studies have to be publicly available — as a blog or post in the corporate website, for example.
• There should be a migration practice page.
• Need to have blog posts published by members of the team, which focusses on migration use cases.
• A certain number of certifications (this depends on the competency applied for).
• You should be able to do a self-assessment of the provided Validation Checklist.

Completing the Checklist

Once you have made sure that you meet all the pre-requisites, complete the checklist and send it across to your PSA or PDM for an initial validation.

Addressing the Gaps

If this your first competency application, there are bound to be gaps in the requirements above in the validation checklist. You need to work on these gaps, and this means that it is not only the documentation that you need to work on, but you might need to re-think how your organisation approaches complex projects. You will need to work on people, processes, technology operations, documentation, security, support methodology etc.

Submission, Review and Audit

Once you have the submission validated, it’s time to submit the application for the competency. After a process that takes a few weeks including internal reviews and an external audit, AWS will inform you of the status of your application.

The Audit and what to expect

Prepare well for the audit. It takes at least 4 hours — and will cover all aspects mentioned in the application. Expect to provide detailed explanations and show evidence.

This is an online audit, and you can schedule the audit using your preferred collaboration tool, we used Amazon Chime and it worked well for us.

Congratulations

Once you complete the audit process, AWS will let you know the status of your application. You will receive emails welcoming you to the program — and now it’s time to sit back and relax.

How the Competency Application has helped us

It took us more than a year aligning our migration practice to the AWS Prescriptive Guidance for doing migrations (https://aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/large-migrations). It took us around 4 months to prepare for the competency application.

By the end of the competency application process and the subsequent award, we had completely transformed our migration practice. From doing ad-hoc migrations to following a process oriented, outcome based migration strategy, we are now able to do many large migrations reliably, repeatedly.

We make use of AWS tools that help us succeed in our migration projects, tools like MRA, ADS, MPA, Migration Hub, Control Tower, MGN, DMS etc. Using these tools along with the processes and controls now enables us to do migrations at scale, reducing the time and effort by more than 50%.

We are also a DevOps Competency partner and have a thriving and successful DevOps practice. Working towards the DevOps Competency made our practice much more process oriented and scalable.

Attaining an AWS competency is not an end by itself, but it is an exercise in creating excellence in the practice of your choice.