From early AWS adopters to Select Tier Partner
We've recently been validated as a Select Tier partner in the AWS Partner Network, on the Services path. It's a milestone worth marking, not because it changes what we do, but because it formally recognises how we've been working for a long time.
Early adoption
We started using AWS in the early 2010s, at a time when most of the projects we worked on were heading to traditional hosting providers with a single server running a web application, database and file storage all on one box. When we started exploring AWS, what struck us wasn't just that you could host things differently, it was that you could separate concerns entirely. S3 for storage, RDS for databases, EC2 for compute - each one a managed service you could rely on independently, with its own durability, scaling and lifecycle.
That's a more significant transition than it sounds. It's not just swapping one server provider for another, it changes how you approach architecture, application and business logic, deployment and scaling from the ground up.
Infrastructure evolution
How we manage infrastructure has evolved significantly too. In the early days on AWS it was console work - clicking through the AWS dashboard, configuring things manually, and doing your best to document what you'd done so you could replicate it later. CloudFormation brought infrastructure-as-code into the picture, which was a step forward, though debugging huge JSON or YAML templates could be frustrating. But the shift that's made the biggest difference for us has been AWS CDK, where we can define infrastructure in real code, with the expressiveness and reuse that brings.
Founding Si Novi and choosing serverless
When we founded Si Novi in 2018, we made a conscious decision to add serverless application development to our practice, using Lambda and DynamoDB. That was a natural extension of our experience with AWS and the direction we were already heading in. Serverless felt like the next step in the evolution with even more managed services, more abstraction, and an even greater emphasis on building applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
Serverless structures aligned perfectly with our approach to building well-architected systems that could scale and evolve over time, and put more tools in our hands to choose the right components for each client project.
In the years that followed we began to blend serverless with event driven architectures and containerised workloads, building applications which draw on the whole ecosystem of AWS services. A web based application is no longer an app on a server - it's a system build on cloud infrastructure.
Shaped by client work
This evolution over 10-15 years has been shaped almost entirely by our client work. The systems we build have become more ambitious as the AWS platform has matured, and as our clients' needs have grown.
The work now involves well-architected systems with clear separation of concerns, managed services where they make sense, and infrastructure that can scale without requiring a rethink every time something changes.
Many of our clients have been with us for years, and their platforms have evolved alongside our approach. That long-term relationship is a big part of how we've got here.
The partner journey
The partner journey grew out of all this quite naturally. We've been attending AWS events for years - summits, partner days, community meetups - and engaging more closely with AWS teams along the way. At a certain point, formalising the relationship just made sense.
The Select Tier validation isn't a case of signing up, but rather it requires demonstrated client workloads, ongoing revenue, technical certifications, and accreditations across the team and the wider network we work with. Meeting those requirements felt less like reaching for something new and more like a recognition of what was already in place.
What it validates, more than anything, is consistency.
We've been building and supporting web applications on AWS for over a decade. Not proofs of concept or short-lived experiments, but production systems that businesses rely on - the kind of systems where decisions made early on have a long tail, and where getting the fundamentals right at the start genuinely matters. That's been our focus throughout, and this is an external confirmation of it.
What it means for our clients
For our clients, the day-to-day doesn't change. Same team, same approach, same focus on building things well and then staying involved to support and evolve them over time. What the partnership does provide is a closer alignment with AWS with better access to partner programmes, support resources, and the ability to engage more directly with AWS where it benefits a project. The fundamentals remain exactly as they were with our passion for technology and the web brought to life on the AWS platform.
We didn't set out to become a partner. We set out to build good systems on AWS, and this is where that's led.
