AWS competencies & designations
Evidenced practice areas, not self-declared ones.
An AWS Competency is earned by submitting customer references, passing a technical architecture review, and demonstrating repeatable outcomes. Every designation below states what it covers, where we have run it, and whether it is validated or in progress.
AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner
Tier reflects certified headcount, launched opportunities, and validated practice areas.
- Advanced Tier
- 5 in progress
- 6 designations
- 12 held
What these mean
Three different things, often confused.
Partners use these terms loosely. They are not interchangeable, and the bar for each is different — worth knowing before you compare two proposals.
Competency
A broad practice area — migration, data, security — validated through customer references, a technical review of real architectures, and demonstrated outcomes.
The bar
Highest · customer-evidenced
Service Delivery
Validated expertise in one specific AWS service, such as Amazon Redshift or AWS Lambda. Narrower scope, same evidence requirement.
The bar
Per-service · evidenced
Programme participation
Enrolment in funding or enablement programmes. Useful to clients, but it reflects membership rather than assessed capability.
The bar
Lowest · enrolment only
Competencies
What we are validating.
Each competency has its own page with the validation criteria, the architecture patterns behind it, and the case studies behind our submission.
Migration & Modernization Competency
Moving production estates onto AWS without a maintenance window, then decomposing what remains once they are there. Assessed on wave planning, cutover rehearsal, and evidenced rollback.
- 6R assessment
- Rehearsed cutover
- Strangler fig
- Customer references are published once approved
Reviewed
In progress
Renews
—
Cloud Operations Competency
Running what we build — observability, incident practice, cost management, and the guardrails that keep an estate compliant after handover. Assessed on operational maturity, not architecture alone.
- Observability
- Incident response
- FinOps
- Config guardrails
- Customer references are published once approved
Reviewed
In progress
Renews
—
Data & Analytics Competency
Warehouses, streaming pipelines, and managed ETL that remain operable after the engineering team leaves. Assessed on modelling discipline and data quality practice.
- Redshift
- Kinesis
- Glue ETL
- Semantic layer
- Customer references are published once approved
Reviewed
In progress
Renews
—
Machine Learning Competency
Applied AI that acts inside a product rather than alongside it — agent tooling, evaluation harnesses, and inference cost discipline on Bedrock and SageMaker.
- Bedrock
- SageMaker
- Agent tooling
- Evals
- Customer references are published once approved
Reviewed
In progress
Renews
—
Security Competency
Residency-first architecture, least-privilege identity, and audit trails designed in from the first schema — for workloads an auditor will eventually examine.
- Data residency
- IAM
- KMS
- Audit logging
- Customer references are published once approved
Reviewed
In progress
Renews
—
Service delivery
Individual services we are pursuing designations in.
Service Delivery designations are narrower than a competency — they validate demonstrated expertise with one specific AWS service, again through customer evidence and technical review.
Related offeringsAmazon Aurora
Database migration and HA design.
AWS Lambda
Event-driven and serverless builds.
Amazon Redshift
Warehousing and analytics modelling.
Amazon EKS
Container platform and workloads.
Amazon Kinesis
Streaming ingest and replay.
AWS WAF
Edge protection and tuning.
How validation works
Four gates, then a renewal clock.
Competencies are not permanent. They lapse if the practice stops producing evidence, which is why we only pursue areas our engagements actually go.
If a partner lists a competency without naming the customer work behind it, ask which references were submitted. AWS requires them; the partner should be able to describe them.
Practice evidence
Certified staff, launched opportunities, and a documented delivery method for the area.
Customer references
Named engagements with contactable clients, submitted to AWS with architecture detail.
Technical review
AWS reviewers examine real architectures against the competency's checklist.
Renewal
Re-validated on AWS's cycle. Lapses if the practice stops producing evidence.
Work with our AWS team
Ask us which
references we submitted.
We will walk you through the actual engagements behind any competency on this page — architecture, outcomes, and what we would do differently.