Why (and how) we became certified AWS Service Delivery partners?

Of late, we have found ourselves working increasingly on serverless approaches and have been helping organizations leverage this technology to add scalability and agility to their business. The benefits of serverless are clear, especially as it allows organizations to automatically run at scale applications based on immediate, individual requests. With the number of serverless projects increasing in our software development portfolio, moving on and adding the AWS Service Delivery partner certification was a natural progression.

Why did we embark on the AWS Service Delivery partner journey?

The decision to add AWS Service Delivery expertise is that we are moving into that age when all products shall be cloud products. Indeed, one of the reasons to become an AWS Service Delivery partner was to formalize and codify a granular and comprehensive understanding of AWS. The process of getting certified as AWS Service Delivery partners helped us improve our technical expertise and gain deep knowledge of the latest AWS serverless offering’s features and best practices. We believe this will increase our time efficiencies by ensuring efficient deployments, expert implementation, and the exact configuration. With this certification, we also gained the capacity to bring AWS-certified product-level best practices to the products we build. This certification will help us build optimized products for cost, security, performance, and scalability.

By going through the rigorous certification process, we shall embed a deeper understanding of particular and peculiar needs and challenges of products that operate in the setup.

This expertise and experience become especially relevant and almost invaluable as we are increasingly adopting cloud-friendly development models like DevOps and are heavily using technology approaches like serverless or cloud-native.

How did we become AWS Service Deliver partners?

Of course, AWS offers many certifications to design solutions to meet today’s dynamic and challenging market demands. AWS Service Delivery Partners must pass a high technical bar to clear the certification process. Our objective was to leverage the AWS Service Delivery partner certification to design best-in-class experiences for our customers using the latest technologies. It was essential to pick and choose the right AWS services to seek accreditation in, focusing on Serverless. We decided to get the certifications in AWS API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and AWS Dynamo DB.

The certification process

The AWS certification process demands extreme rigor and detail. We had to build case studies with real-world examples. AWS requires complete command and deep technical know-how of how the systems work and how the developer can use the tools and services to create impactful solutions in those areas.

There are many frameworks and design principles that AWS expects you to adhere to. This standard includes the problem statement definition, the journey framework, and business planning followed by product strategy. We also had to define the goals and outcomes for each part of the journey. Each project had to prove that the design used the salient tenets as outlined by AWS and followed the AWS framework to the tee.

We had to list specific projects for the certification based on the AWS services. This list creation involved providing detailed information regarding the customer and a problem statement identifying the issues we are trying to resolve by building AWS services-based solutions.

We then had to provide the project roadmap highlighting the proposed solution and architecture. The technical team shared the architecture diagram along with the case study document for reference and review.

We also had to notify AWS that the customer engagement had started, the list of services used, and highlight the chosen services being put to work to prove the depth of the project to AWS.

The project progress and iterations had to be documented in detail and shared with the case study document for detailed reference.

Once the service delivery began, the team furnished all data regarding the project at regular intervals to AWS. We also had to respond to multiple queries and questions posed by AWS to prove that adequate frameworks were applied and all necessary protocols and steps followed.

We had to actively use the tracker provided in the AWS dashboard to list and highlight all details and information regarding project progress. This dashboard presents all the launched opportunities that were required to showcase to AWS for the certification process. It provides essential information to AWS like whether the customer is live, the project is valid, generating revenue for the customer, and recurring use of AWS services.

This certification process as AWS Service Delivery Partners also warranted that the project leads be AWS certified. We ensured we trained the correct number of people across the chosen AWS services to move up the partner scorecard. As it stands, we are actively identifying more certifications for our technologists as well.

Once all these parts came together and completed each project, the AWS team evaluated the project, checked for completeness, and followed the frameworks and protocols. These checks are also done to avoid proxies and maintain project integrity. We successfully addressed all the questions raised by AWS and could successfully submit all our completed projects for a successful evaluation.

In Conclusion

We undertook and submitted several live projects as case studies for our AWS Service Delivery certification to come through. With the AWS certification in place, our confidence in building better products has increased, as has our knowledge of navigating the design and architecture, development, and testing stages of product development with greater dexterity.

With this certification under our belt, we aim to solidify our expertise in developing world-class solutions that solve pressing business problems and help our clients become more agile and flexible in a world enveloped in disruption. I hope that will help us climb up the AWS leaderboard too!