Picture credit: «The Crunchies Awards 2008», by «Nandor Fejer», used under CC BY / Modified from original

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched AWS Migration Competency, a list of more than 30 long-standing partners in cloud delivery, consulting, mobility and more to help customers with deeper migrations.

With the AWS Partner Competency Program, which has validated that each partner has demonstrable expertise in helping enterprise customers migrate applications and infrastructure to AWS, the IaaS giant aims to reduce the complexity of adoption, with delivery partners including Cognizant and Accenture among others.

Kate Miller, AWS strategic communications manager, wrote in a company blog post: “Workload migration is a key milestone of the customer journey on AWS, and helping customers map out a clear and comprehensive migration strategy is a top priority in which AWS Partner Network partners can provide enormous support.

“But customers need guidance to ensure they’re connecting with the right AWS Partners who’ve proven they have a strong AWS practice, have demonstrated customer success, and have demonstrated technical proficiency throughout the different phases of migrations.”

One of the accredited delivery partners is managed hosting provider Logicworks. The New York-based firm, which regularly contributes to this publication, recently put together a piece from solutions architect Tenpa Kunga on his eureka moment when first dealing with AWS. “What I do every day is of a completely different order of magnitude than what I did 10 years ago,” he wrote. “Maybe 10 years ago I could spend a day to fix one hard drive. Now I spend that day building out entire systems and with automation, I can make sure that the changes I make later are persistent and documented.

“In other words, I have become the conductor of vast systems rather than the firefighter of broken machines – virtual or otherwise.”

In previous weeks, AWS has launched X1 instances, seen as the most memory-intensive of any SAP-certified cloud instance available today, while earlier this week part of the firm’s EC2 service in Sydney fell over for six hours, causing the usual mix of anger and frustration, as well as other commenters who argued Australia needs another geographic data centre location.

You can find a full list of AWS partners here.