AWS Navigate Program

Posted on March 20, 2020 | by Ozzy Brightrose | Leave a Comment

AWS Navigate Program

APN Navigate program is a guide that helps APN Partners to know how to build, market, sell, and specialize as an APN Partner. The Navigate Program also helps APN Partners to deepen their knowledge to become a successful APN Partner through the APN Navigate Foundations path by establishing fundamental building blocks. This helps APN Partners to become successful as AWS experts and deploy innovative solutions on behalf of AWS customers through APN Navigate Specialization tracks.

Navigate Path Types

Navigate Path is categorized into two paths:

APN Navigate Foundations – This program is for the businesses who are new to A
APN Navigate Specializations – This path is for existing APN partners.

How Do Navigate Path Types Work?

Navigate Path Types work in three steps:

Learn – The APN Partners get access to a dedicated folder that includes all tools, templates, and resources that are recommended by AWS experts.
Action – Being an APN Partner, you need to work on key deliverables that can help you in your APN journey.
Connect – Once you meet all the key checkpoints, check back with AWS.

How to get started with APN Navigation Foundations?

The APN Navigate Foundations Path introduces you to the APN and helps you know the strategy to build, market, sell, and specialize your business by becoming an APN Partner.

This navigate path defines your partner journey with AWS and helps you get access to the Select Tier. You can access the APN Navigate Foundations Path only if you’re an APN registered business partner.

Getting access to the APN Navigation Foundations path means deepening your knowledge on the benefits, requirements, and tools to become an APN Partner successfully.

You can get started with APN Foundations by taking the following steps:

1) Access APN Navigate Toolbox Foundations in APN Partner Central – This offers access to all relevant and current resources to become a successful APN partner.

2) Review your APN Navigate Goals Checklist – This roadmap assists you with the resources and actions that you need to achieve Select Tier.

3) Download Alliance Lead Cheat Sheet and Deep Dive Resource Guide – These guides offer access to AWS experts’ recommended additional resources.

4) The next step is to report your organization’s progress to AWS using the Checklist.

Now, as you’ve learned how to get started with the APN Navigations Path, it’s time for you to know about the APN Navigate Specializations Path.

How to get started with APN Navigate Specializations Path?

This path provides AWS Partner Network (APN) members with all the knowledge and tools to become specialists in a solution, industry, workload, or service area on AWS.

AWS Navigate Program – Path

Depending on your organization’s interest, you can choose any tracks (in which you want to improve your knowledge) mentioned below:

Contact Center – This track connects APN Partners to Amazon Connect experts. It allows deepening their skills around the AWS services community, and how to implement innovative customer experience solutions.
End-user computing – This track is for the APN Partners who want to be experts in Desktop and Application Streaming solutions on AWS.
Microsoft Workloads – This track helps APN Partners to build a solution to deploy customers’ Microsoft Workloads on AWS.
Machine Learning – The Machine Learning Navigate enables APN Partners to get expertise around machine learning.
Blockchain – The APN Navigate for Blockchain track enables APN Partners to build expertise around building Blockchain applications on AWS. The APN Partners can access flexible and cost-effective resources that can help them quickly deploy and experiment with blockchain networks in minutes.
IoT – The IoT track enables APN Partners to learn how to build a practice around IoT services on AWS. This track allows them to learn about the core AWS IoT services and how to build an IoT practice on AWS.
Migration – The Migration track allows APN Partners to build a strong a foundation that will support them in deploying migration capabilities on AWS.
DevOps – The DevOps enables APN Partners to learn how to build a DevOps Practice. DevOps is the best way to innovate faster while improving quality and security at the same time.
Serverless – The Serverless track allows AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners to deepen their understanding on various AWS Serverless Platforms such as Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon Cognito, and AWS Step Functions.
Database Services – The APN Navigate for Database Services enables APN Partners to learn how to build a practice around Amazon Aurora.
High-Performance Computing – The High-Performance Computing (HPC) enables APN Partners to learn how to specialize in high-performance computing (HPC) on AWS.
SAP – Many businesses are running on SAP in the cloud to simplify infrastructure management, improve time-to-market, and lower costs. The APN Navigate for SAP offers access to APN Partners who want to learn the skills and tools to expand their ability to support SAP customers on the AWS cloud.
Security – At AWS, Cloud Security is the highest priority. The APN Navigate offers guides, tools, and resources to the APN Partners who want to build expertise in cloud security solutions on AWS.
Containers – The Containers track offers a comprehensive understanding of the AWS Container Services – Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, AWS App Mesh and Amazon ECR to APN Partners.
SaaS Enablement – This track is for registered APN partners who want to develop their skills in designing and implementing SaaS solutions on AWS.

Want to know more about AWS Navigate Program and APN Partners, stay tuned to our blog!

AWS Technology Partners

Cloud Pricing Models Made Easy in 5 Steps

Posted on March 19, 2020 | by Ozzy Brightrose | Leave a Comment

Cloud pricing models made easy

In theory, you need to run your own private cloud to enjoy the ultimate in customizability. In practice, mainstream public clouds are likely to have more than enough customization options to satisfy even the most demanding of customers. There are literally millions of combinations of options and that’s even before you get to the different pricing models including dynamic pricing. Staying on top of all this can be a real nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be.

1. Tagging and SKUs can clear the chaos

While you may have many questions you would like your billing reports to answer, most of them revolve around two key issues.

1. - What is the unit cost of X?
  - Who should pay for this?

The way to figure out the answer to either or both questions is to link back any asset used to a deployment item, which should have an owner. In principle, you could just link each SKU directly to a deployment item, but in practice, most companies are going to want a much greater level of detail. This means that you’re usually aiming to link an SKU with a component of a deployment item. Generally, this will be achieved by tagging.

For the sake of completeness, if you’re working in the multicloud, you’ll want to create a tagging system that works across all providers. This means you will need to standardize your syntax based on what is available at the provider with the most restrictive options.

2. Check SKUs first and instances second (if at all)

The problem with using instance reports to try to work out the costs of a deployment item is that it’s usually much easier to see what was being used than to see why it was being used. As a result, it can be difficult, or even impossible, to be sure that you are linking any instance with the right deployment item.

In many cases, the real value of instance reports is as a “hygiene” check to ensure that instances are being used responsibly. For example, if you see that instances are regularly being spun up late on a Friday and left running until Monday, then you may want to check if this is a legitimate out-of-hours task or if people are just forgetting to shut them down before they leave for the weekend.

3. Reformat billing reports so that they reflect the architecture of your system

Another advantage of working via SKUs rather than instance types is that it should make it possible for you to reformat the billing reports so that they reflect the architecture of your system. This can go a long way to getting financial and management staff on the same page as technical staff.

Just as financial staff do not necessarily understand the details of technology, so technical staff may struggle with billing reports. Presenting the financial costs in a way that clearly links them with the underlying infrastructure can make billing data much more understandable for both sets of staff.

As a bonus, this approach can also make it much easier to see where billing does not tally with your expectations and/or where there is room for economies to be made.

4. Focus on usage first and payment terms second

Cloud costs reflect both the economy of your usage and the economy of your payment terms. If your cloud costs are higher than you’d expect, you usually want to start by checking what you can do at your end and only move on to looking at payment terms once you are confident that you have done everything you can to make your applications work as efficiently as possible.

In this context, remember that a lot of cloud cost optimization ultimately boils down to creating applications that minimize if not eliminate the movement of data, especially between different sectors (whatever name they are given in any specific cloud platform).

There are two reasons for taking this approach. The first is that you might already have the most economical deal. If that’s the case, then you’ll be wasting time and hence wasting money trying to look for a better one since the problem lies with you rather than your cloud platform. Secondly, by making your applications as efficient as they can be, you put yourself in a much better position to work out what the best deal for you actually is.

5. Remember there’s more to the cloud than headline price

Having just explained how to understand cloud pricing models, it’s worth closing with a reminder that price is only one fact to consider in cloud deployments. There are many others, particularly security, reliability, and flexibility.

It’s also worth remembering that cloud pricing models change frequently and that when they do, you need to think carefully about the advantages of updating your usage and/or payment terms to take advantage of them versus the effort required to do so. What this often means in practice is that it makes more sense to fine-tune your usage with an existing provider than to keep switching between providers in search of a better deal.

multi cloud cost management

What is AWS SaaS Factory?

Posted on March 17, 2020 | by Ozzy Brightrose | Leave a Comment

AWS SaaS Factory

AWS SaaS Factory was introduced to help independent software vendors (ISVs) build SaaS offerings on AWS. This program provides direct access to technical and business content, best practices, and many engagement opportunities that empower independent software vendors (ISVs) who are planning or trying to build SaaS offerings on AWS. The program was introduced to accelerate and guide the delivery of SaaS on AWS solutions.

What is included in AWS SaaS Factory?

The AWS SaaS factory program includes various reference architectures, blog posts, Bootcamp, learning modules, AWS Quick Starts, and interactive activities such as webinars and workshops that provide prescriptive guidance on building and operating SaaS solutions on AWS. Being an ISV, you also get information about the AWS Partner Network Partners offerings that address many of the common functional and operational elements of SaaS environments.

AWS SaaS Factory

How Can AWS SaaS Factory Help ISVs?

The main focus of the AWS SaaS Factory is to help customers and APN Partners at all stages of the SaaS on the AWS journey. The whole journey includes many stages, such as the adoption of a SaaS delivery model, migration, and optimization. The SaaS delivery model appeal has many ISVs who are actively making the transition to multi-tenant architecture.

SaaS Factory engagements are offered through one-to-one and one-to-many (Boot camp and webinar/learning modules) delivery models. The SaaS agility enables independent software vendors to release new features at a more rapid pace. This allows them to respond to their customers before their competitors.

The delivery model of SaaS also provides ISVs with a more efficient approach. The approach supports independent software vendors to address frictionless onboarding of new customers while still optimizing the overall infrastructure footprint cost.

Once an organization migrates to a SaaS delivery model, AWS SaaS Factory offers enablement content, prescriptive guidance, and reference materials to strengthen ISVs in their SaaS on the AWS journey. The program addresses the needs of APN Partners that need help with moving existing solutions to AWS, building greenfield SaaS products, or targeting new market segments. It also offers access to information on the needs of APN Partners that are refactoring existing single-tenant solutions.

The AWS SaaS Factory team offers guidance to existing SaaS providers who are looking to refine the cost, architecture, or operational efficiency of their products.

Are you a good fit for AWS Saas Factory?

The main aim of the AWS SaaS Factory is to empower customers and APN Partners that are looking for guidance with technical, business, or operational aspects of their current or future SaaS solutions.

The AWS SaaS Factory addresses these topics through a combination of workshops and web-based content that covers a full spectrum of SaaS technical and business best practices. It provides strategies to assist ISVs who are at different levels in their AWS SaaS journey. The program includes information about the creation of new SaaS offerings, single-tenant product migration, or an existing SaaS solution optimization.

The APN Partners have additional benefits through AWS SaaS Factory and access to vast amounts of content through APN Partner Central.

If you’re planning to move to a Saas model, you might need to rethink many of the fundamental aspects, including how you build, deploy, and operate your products. Whenever you adopt a SaaS delivery model, some areas get impacted at a huge level. These include marketing strategies, operations, pricing models, and sales compensation structures.

What does SaaS Factory Program include?

Some of the resources that are available in the SaaS Factory Program are:

SaaS Architecture Overview –If you’re planning to move to a SaaS model, it’s a great idea to have a general introduction to SaaS principles and architecture. The goal of the Saas Architecture course is to provide an introduction to the core terminology, strategies, and patterns that can be used while building SaaS products on AWS.

SaaS Business Enablement –In this module, you get access to the valuable information provided by APN, including pricing, transformations, customer success, marketing, and go-to-market (GTM) support and resources.

Tenant Isolation –This module offers information on your tenants that can shape and influence your approach to isolation. A basic understanding of the AWS strategies and AWS services that can help is essential to construct secure SaaS solutions on AWS.

Data Partitioning –This module offers some information about the common techniques that are used to implement partitioning in SaaS environments.

Application Migration – This module provides access to strategies and approaches that will help you understand how to migrate the existing single-tenant product to a multi-tenant model.

Serverless SaaS –This module addresses various common pain points for SaaS architecture.

Want to know more about AWS SaaS Factory, do let us know in the comment section below.

Mastering Multi Cloud Cost Management in 6 Steps

Posted on March 16, 2020 | by Ozzy Brightrose | Leave a Comment

Mastering Multi Cloud Cost Management

According to a recent study by Gartner, nearly half of organizations with cloud workloads expect to be engaged with three or more public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers by the end of 2020. As companies increase the number of cloud platforms they use, so they increase the challenge of managing their cloud expenditure.

Effective tagging is an integral part of meeting this challenge, but on its own it’s unlikely to be enough to guide you through the maze. With that in mind, here is a six-step guide to mastering costs in the multicloud.

1. Divide your overall workload into its component parts e.g. projects, products, services

Your first challenge is to work out what exactly it is you need to track. Usually the most pragmatic approach to doing this is to start at a top level, e.g. a project and then divide it up into its component parts going into as much depth as you feel is relevant. In principle, you usually want more detail rather than less, especially since tags are not applied to reports/bills retrospectively, but equally you want to avoid a situation where you’re basically drowning in tags. In other words, apply common sense and remember you can always adjust later.

Remember to document this process thoroughly. You really want to capture not just what you decided, but why you decided it. This could be very useful when it comes to updating tags, which often needs to be done on a fairly regular basis. Capturing your thought process can not only help new staff to get up-to-speed quickly but also help refresh the memories of people who actually were there but have been focusing on other matters since the last meeting.

This could also be a good time to get agreement on who pays for what, although, in some cases, that may only be possible once people get a proper look at the bill(s).

2. Develop a consistent tagging strategy you can use across cloud providers

The previous exercise should show you what you want tagged, your next task is to check the tagging rules of each provider you use and develop a set of tags which you can use on all of them. This means working to the most restrictive specification. Again, try to use consistent terminology and document everything. You should literally be able to take someone who doesn’t know anything about your business, give them a bill and a list of tags and have them work it out without any difficulty whatsoever.

Pro-tip, check very thoroughly to ensure that you have completely eliminated any duplicate tags. If you want to track the same component across different billing items (e.g. projects, products and/or services), then create a tag for each billing item. It’s fine if they’re similar, even if they’re almost identical, but they must never be completely identical.

3. Make sure you keep on top of each cloud provider’s pricing model(s)

All service providers change their prices from time to time, but cloud vendors tend to do so more often than most. This means that you need to make an active effort to keep on top of their pricing model(s) and to understand what they mean for your multi-cloud strategy.

4. As far as possible, normalize billing terms and cycles

Normalizing billing terms can be more of a challenge than it might sound. For example, if you’re using one cloud regularly for predictable workload and another on an ad hoc basis for tasks which can be scheduled with a high degree of flexibility, then common sense would suggest that the most cost-effective approach would be to go for volume/prepayment discounts on the former and aim to use the best spot prices on the latter.

What you can do is use your knowledge of each cloud provider’s pricing model(s) to see what the price would have been if you had used an alternative service. You can also look at what the price would have been had you used a different service and/or pricing option with the same provider.

Normalizing billing cycles is mostly a convenience. The main advantage is that you get the current financial and usage data for all providers at the same time and hence can easily consolidate it and analyse it all at once as opposed to having to do it piecemeal over the course of a month.

5. Breakdown your bills using the tags and then consolidate these tags to the highest level

If you’ve developed an effective tagging system, you should both be able to see which component part of which billed item is generating which costs and be able to consolidate these costs back to the highest-level item, e.g. your project, product or service, to understand the full cost of the item.

6. Make sure that the right costs are charged to the right cost centers

This involves getting agreement on who pays for what and then developing a process to convert the information from the tags into charging information for your internal billing system (and possibly an external billing system as well).

AWS Lambda Cost Calculator

S3 Cost Calculator

EC2 Cost Calculator

AWS Data Transfer Calculator

EC2 Cost Calculator | AWS EC2 Pricing

Posted on March 14, 2020 | by Ozzy Brightrose

AWS EC2 Cost Calculator

AWS EC2 costs will mainly depend on where you run the instance, operating system and instance type. An instance type can be storage, compute, memory and GPU optimized. There is also general-purpose instance where it balanced compute, storage and memory resources. EC2 instances are grouped into different families, such as the M family for general purpose instances and the R family for memory-optimized instances. Each instance type has different prices per hour.

AWS also offers Reservations and Saving Plans that should be considered at first place. You can choose to pay for instances on-demand, or by using reserved instances or spot instances, A reservation dedicates resources and capacity for 1 or 3 years for particular AZ within a region. You should either pay all upfront, partial or no-upfront for reservations and commit to paying all of the hours of using the resource.

AWS EC2 computes cloud cost calculation based on hourly usage rather than monthly.

Your yearly commitment will determine your hourly EC2 rates. Hourly rates of EC2 instances are lowered based on your commitment types. Savings plans offer flexible pricing model that is free from instance type or region. This EC2 pricing calculator here will show you all different tenancy and purchase options with a graph giving you visibility with your total pricing over time.

AWS EC2 computes cloud cost calculation based on hourly usage rather than monthly.

This EC2 calculator will help you to see

Comparison on demand cost vs reservations options
Total cost of ownership over years
Breakeven point where on demand instance cost exceeds your reserve instance cost

AWS Data transfers costs should be also considered together with EC2 Costs.

Data transfer will become an important cost item for heavy used applications. AWS charges if data is transferred to internet or between AWS services, regions or Availability zones.Private or public IP or even transferring data to Amazon CloudFront and distribute from them will also effect overall cost structure. You can also check our data transfer calculator : Data transfer calculator

Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is high-performance block storage service designed to work with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

You pay only what you provision, you can change volume types and modify the provisioned IOPS capacity anytime without disrupting you applications. You can attach multiple EBS volumes to a single instance, EBS costs should be considered together with EC2 costs too.

AWS EC2 Cost Calculator

AWS EC2 computes cloud cost calculation based on hourly usage rather than monthly.

This EC2 calculator will help you to see

Comparison on demand cost vs reservations options
Total cost of ownership over years
Breakeven point where on demand instance cost exceeds your reserve instance cost

AWS Data transfers costs should be also considered together with EC2 Costs.

Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is high-performance block storage service designed to work with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

You can compare these results with Azure VM Pricing using our Azure VM Cost Calculator

Data Transfer Calculator

Posted on March 14, 2020 | by Ozzy Brightrose | Leave a Comment

AWS Data Transfer Calculator

AWS Data transfers costs will become an important cost item for heavy used applications.

AWS charges if data is transferred to internet or between AWS services, regions or Availability zones.Private or public IP or even transferring data to Amazon CloudFront and distribute from them will also effect overall cost structure.

Author: Ozzy Brightrose