As it is every year, this week is pretty exciting for Cloud Computing and AWS in particular!

Let’s take a look at this year’s announcements during the Partner Keynote.

Ruba Borno has been with AWS for about a year now and she is currently leading the effort for worldwide channels and alliances for AWS. This is a key role for Amazon since partners are focused on specific areas and help customers implement solutions in the field.

AWS Partners are a tremendous driving force of innovation, pushing boundaries and immediately taking advantage of the latest and greatest service offerings to their customers! 

Without further ado, let’s see what we got going on this year!

AWS Partner Solution Factory, now in Preview

AWS is bringing customers and partners closer together with this solution.

The goal is to allow collaboration between AWS Experts and partners to storyboard, design, architect and demo actual solutions to help customers solve their technical challenges.

In this case, imagine that you are a customer and you hire a consulting partner to implement a solution for your business. Once your solution is implemented, you could have AWS in-house experts perform a well-architected review of the solution, giving you peace of mind that your solution is rock-solid, secure and highly-available.

Even better if these solutions are pre-built, well-tested and already-deployed to existing AWS customers! That’s the power of this offering!

Introducing AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights

This is a service intended to help assess risk by enabling sellers to make security and compliance information available in the marketplace. Using the provided web-based dashboard, sellers and buyers will be able to see governance, compliance, and related information including data privacy, access control, application security, and more.

It also helps sellers promote their security posture, which reduces the repetitive task of responding to buyers that require risk assessment information.

Initially, the seller creates a security profile which then can be used to grant access to buyers where they can see AWS-sourced evidence, directly from the seller’s environment. This includes AWS Config data, AWS Audit Assessment, external audits ( such as SOC2 and ISO27001), and of course, seller self-assessments as well.

The buyer can review this data on their dashboard or download it for importing in their own vendor management software.

This service can help shorten months of back-and-forth with questionnaires which shortens lead times and keeps everybody honest by monitoring expiration dates (for example) for compliance certifications.

There is no cost associated with this service and it’s available right now in any region where the AWS Marketplace is available.

Announcing the preview release of Data Exchange for AWS Lake Formation

Just a quick refresher on Data Exchange, it’s a service introduced back in 2019 and it is used as a marketplace to connect third-party data providers with customers that need their data. It’s a very efficient way to make your cloud applications smart by using up-to-date data sources directly from producers.

This new feature announced in Preview today is specific to AWS Lake Formation and it allows subscribers to find and use third-party datasets that are managed directly through Lake Formation.

If you recall, Lake Formation is AWS’ answer for those in need of Data Lakes which can then be used to perform analytics and machine learning across various data sets.

Once subscribed, you will see the third-party data set in Lake Formation and then be able to query, transform and share it within your AWS account or your AWS Organization, using License Manager. The benefit is that the data just shows up as any other piece of data in your Lake Formation setup, so, there’s nothing new to learn or overhead to manage by your data science team: No importing, no ETL, no pipelines… just straight to analysis!

This feature (again, still in preview!) is available in most AWS Regions!

Teaching Cloud Computing

As always, AWS and its partners try their best to upskill IT personnel around the world to close the gap between opportunities in cloud computing and those who can’t fill those jobs due to a lack of skills.

There was a good portion of the keynote dedicated to showcasing a couple of engineers in Brazil whose lives were changed thanks to learning the skill of cloud computing (AWS is widely-adopted in Brazil). 

It was very motivating and I can relate to them because 6 years ago I decided to upskill myself ( using CloudAcademy, no less! ) and here I am today, teaching the next generation “how to Cloud”!

Cloud Academy aligns itself with those goals as well, as we continue to produce up-to-date content to help our audience reach high and achieve goals in cloud computing!

Moving forward together

The theme bringing everything together for this keynote was that of working towards a common goal: AWS, its partners and customers, in order to create a positive impact in the world.  I thought it was well put together as it showed the social aspect of what we do.  

And that wraps it up for the partner keynote 2022! Hopefully, you can relate your current projects to one or more of these releases and start taking advantage of them immediately! 

I am personally interested in the S3 Bucket offering for Data Exchange! 

Hmmm… I wonder if there’s still a data set out there that’s valuable and nobody is looking at it!

What’s next on re:Invent?

I look forward to the keynote by Werner Vogels, that one is sure to have at least one or two of those impactful features we all look forward to!  Enjoy the rest of re:Invent week!