What's an AWS Service Designation?

As an AWS partner, we know better than most how massive the AWS ecosystem truly is.  Be wary of anyone who claims to be an expert at everything that AWS offers- the breadth of services is just too wide.  We aren’t trying to ruffle any feathers by saying this- AWS is well aware of this- and to differentiate consulting partners that demonstrate a deep understanding of specific AWS services AWS offers Service Delivery Designations.  West Loop Strategy has just completed earning our first four Service Delivery Designations (in a very short period- our team is awesome!) and this blog will explain how these four designations work together to offer a complete solution for our clients.  

Data

• Have you heard?  Data is the most valuable asset in the world!  And to realize that value, you need an accessible place to store it.  Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is the market leader in this field (we are particularly big fans of the Serverless Aurora databases), and to demonstrate our capabilities here we achieved the Amazon RDS Service Delivery designation. 

Analytics

• Analytics has been a buzz word for years- and for good reason!  Without analytics, data can just sit around, collecting (virtual) dust.  We help our clients put their data to work - via reporting solutions or as embedded analytics in world class applications.  We know that Amazon QuickSight is disrupting this space with a great product at a fraction of the cost of the competitors, and we are proud to be one of the first dozen partners to achieve the Amazon QuickSight Service Delivery designation.

APIs

• All modern applications are built with a sizeable API layer, regardless of the user base.  These APIs range in complexity and need across applications of course, but one thing we have found in common across all of our projects is that this layer gets too complex, too costly, and causes too many problems.  AWS API Gateway solves these problems, and does it at an affordable cost- we find it so easy to use that we went and achieved the Amazon API Gateway Service Delivery designation

Compute

• Under the hood, applications need to handle the information from API calls, or run workloads.  This is traditionally handled by some beefy servers - but these servers introduce a multitude of headaches.  The introduction of serverless technology was an amazing breakthrough- the ability to build applications with infinite scalability at minimal cost keeps us so excited about the direction of our field.  Of course- there is no serverless technology without AWS Lambda, and Lambda functions as the ‘glue’ for many of the projects we deliver - so we achieved the Amazon Lambda Service Delivery designation.

We at West Loop Strategy firmly believe that the four elements discussed here (Data, Analytics, APIs, and Compute) are the foundation for world class modern applications, and we are proud of the tremendous effort it took to validate these skills with the AWS Service Delivery program.  Please reach out to schedule a demo of how these technologies can benefit your organization.