AWS Partners Get New Containers Navigate Track

'We are living in the world of containers in today’s technological terms, and choosing the right container technology and scheduler that are managing workloads can be critical for business,' says Oleksandr Zadorozhnyi, technical director and cloud and transformation lead at Pythian. 'Tailoring technology to customer’s business needs is exactly what AWS is mapping out through the launch of this new program'

Amazon Web Services has a new prescriptive tool for AWS Partner Network (APN) members who want to master container technology on AWS and sell it to customers.

The new APN Navigate for Containers track, introduced this week, helps partners gain expertise in AWS Container Services including Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), AWS Fargate, AWS App Mesh and Amazon Elastic Container Registry.

“Through the AWS Containers Navigate, APN Partners will learn containers best practices, how the AWS services work together, how to identify potential workloads and how to correctly position containers during technical and selling motions with customers,” AWS program manager Jordy Covington said in announcing the new track.

Containers is the 17th specialization track in the APN Navigate program.

Containers-as-a-service is among the top three fastest-growing cloud technologies, according to the 2019 RightScale State of the Cloud report from Flexera released earlier this year. The use of Docker containers and the Kubernetes open-source container-orchestration system is becoming ubiquitous, and AWS ECS and AWS EKS round out the top four most-used container tools, the survey of information technology professionals found.

AWS’ new APN Navigate for Containers includes foundational on-line training in containers for business and technical employees. The non-technical business module is for employees of APN Consulting and Technology Partner companies who sell container services on AWS and must be completed by at least two workers. The technical containers training, which must be taken by a least five employees, focuses on core AWS container services and how to develop optimal AWS consumption for specific container workloads.

The program’s second phase focuses on advanced training and resources recommended by AWS subject matter experts in containers, creating microsites and building business plans to highlight a partner’s containers specialization through its solutions offerings.

Choosing the right container technology and scheduler that are managing workloads can be critical for business, according to Oleksandr Zadorozhnyi, technical director and cloud and transformation lead at Pythian, an Ottawa, Canada-based information technology consultant, managed service provider and APN Advanced Consulting Partner. The new APN Navigate for Containers track will ease the learning curve and help direct the way partners are working with customers who are evolving through their container journey or just at the beginning of it, he said.

“Tailoring technology to customer’s business needs is exactly what AWS is mapping out through the launch of this new program,” Zadorozhnyi said. “Some container-based managed services can be exactly the right fit for customer needs, some may be overkill or limited with the features they deliver.

“As an example, if an organization is looking for a spiking workload and doesn’t require a container management system to be available all the time, it may leverage AWS Fargate versus AWS ECS because of the fleet of virtual machines ready to execute your tasks,” he said. “These small considerations can make cloud resource spending more efficient and predictable, which is the end goal of most customers.”

Updated Courses

AWS this week also released three updated courses to help APN Partners identify cost savings and data center economics for their cloud computing customers. The courses are available via digital and classroom training with an APN Partner Central login.

The cloud provider updated AWS Solutions Training for Partners: SAP on AWS (Business) with new market data, case studies and customer engagement models.

The AWS Cloud Economics (Business) is an update of the existing AWS Total Cost and Cloud Economics accreditation course and was created to teach partners about cost savings and data center economics as it relates to cloud computing.

The new AWS Solutions Training for Partners: VMware on AWS Cloud (Business) courses takes the place of the existing VMware on AWS Cloud course. It provides a partner-focused, business-level introduction to VMware Cloud on AWS and the value of the service, and why customers are adopting hybrid cloud architectures.