Let’s be honest about something nobody says out loud enough: cloud migration is a business decision, not just a technical one. And business decisions require proof before commitment. The problem is that proof costs money.
That’s where AWS Proof of Concept funding comes in.
What Is AWS POC Funding?
AWS allocates credits and sometimes direct cash funding specifically for customers who want to validate a workload, test a new architecture, or migrate a specific component before going all in. It’s not charity. It’s AWS betting on your success because when you grow, they grow. The incentive alignment is real.
At DevOps Group, we help customers structure, apply for, and execute funded POCs as an AWS Advanced Tier Partner. That means we know how to frame the right problem, submit it properly, and deliver something that actually moves a customer from “we’re considering this” to “we’re in production.”
How the Process Works
The way it works is simpler than most people expect. We define the use case together, submit it through the APN partner channel, AWS reviews and approves the scope, funding gets allocated, and we deliver and document the outcome. What you end up with is something concrete to take forward: a board presentation, a go/no-go decision, or a signed contract with your own customers.
The whole cycle can move in weeks, not quarters.
The Real Blocker Nobody Talks About
Fear of sunk cost is one of the most underrated blockers in cloud adoption. And it almost never shows up in technical conversations. It shows up as procurement delays, six-month internal approval cycles, and endless “we need to think about this more” conversations.
AWS POC funding removes that blocker directly. Customers who aren’t afraid to test, grow faster. The friction between “we want to try this” and “we’re doing this” disappears. When the blocker is gone, decisions happen faster, architectures improve sooner, and businesses compound their advantage.
These funds don’t just help you scale infrastructure. They help you scale revenue.
Real Customer Stories
Database Modernization
One customer was running PostgreSQL on a plain EC2 instance. The ops team had set it up years ago and it worked, but it was carrying hidden weight: manual backups, no automated failover, no disaster recovery strategy, and late-night incident calls that nobody wanted.
The real fear wasn’t the migration. It was the bill. “What if we move to RDS or Aurora and it doesn’t work for us? We’ve just paid for an experiment.”
With AWS POC funding, they didn’t have to pay for the experiment. We ran the migration, validated the backup and HA behaviour, and tested the failover. The key outcomes:
- Zero cost to the customer for the validation phase
- Automated backups and Multi-AZ failover in production
- Ops team fully offloaded from manual database management
Today they’re running at a larger scale than before. The business didn’t have to bet money to confirm what the architecture already suggested.
Containerised Workload on EKS
Another customer wanted to validate a containerised microservices workload on EKS before committing to a full platform migration. Three months earlier, that conversation would have stalled at “we don’t have budget to test this properly.”
With a funded POC, we had a running cluster, real traffic patterns validated, and a full cost model built within weeks. They signed a full engagement shortly after.
Is This Relevant to You?
If you’re evaluating AWS and the conversation keeps circling back to “but we need to be sure before we invest,” that’s exactly the conversation we should be having.
DevOps Group can help you structure a POC that qualifies for funding, execute it properly, and turn the output into something you can take to your board. We’ve done it. We know what works.
Pavol Krajkovič
Senior Cloud Architect
