Our clients range from Fortune 500s to two people in a garage. Spend and headcount have never been our filter. The problem is.

That is why this one matters to us. allOps is now an AWS Small and Medium Business Competency Partner, which means AWS has validated both the practice we run for smaller companies and the volume of work behind it.

You can read our excitement and kudos to the team on Linkedn, but in the meantime, let’s see what this particular Competency means for you.

What AWS actually counts as an SMB

It’s worth being precise here, because the term gets used loosely.

AWS defines the SMB segment as companies with annualized revenue under $100M and fewer than 500 employees, explicitly excluding startups, ISVs and digital native businesses. Those get their own programs.

So this is not the “small customers” competency. It is the segment covering established businesses running real operations on AWS without an enterprise budget or a platform team to match.

Manufacturers. Clinics. Logistics operators. Agencies. Companies where the AWS bill matters to the P&L in a way it does not at a Fortune 500, and where there is rarely anyone whose full-time job is the cloud.

There are a lot of them. The UN puts micro, small and medium enterprises at around 90% of businesses worldwide, generating 60 to 70% of employment and half of global GDP.

The World Economic Forum counts roughly 400 million of them.

The number that makes the SMB competency different

Most competencies test depth. This one tests depth and repetition together.

The core requirement is 50 successfully closed and launched AWS opportunities with SMB customers, each a unique customer, each carrying at least $1K in annual recurring revenue, all within 24 months of applying. AWS wants the ACE opportunity IDs. You cannot argue your way past it with one impressive engagement.

We cleared this with more than 50 SMB customers in a year, migrated, secured, optimised or built on, generative and agentic AI included.

That requirement exists for a reason. Serving smaller companies well is a volume discipline. But it also means repeatable service delivery that stays flexible enough to adapt to each customer.

The difficulty is that SMB constraints do not announce themselves in advance. An enterprise tells you its budget cycle, its compliance regime and its headcount before the project starts.

A smaller company often finds out mid-engagement. For example, a customer contract suddenly requires SOC 2, the one person who understood the legacy system leaves, a seasonal spike arrives three months early, or the founder decides the AWS bill has a hard ceiling this quarter and that ceiling is not negotiable.

You cannot plan for each of those specifically. You can only be prepared for a lot of them at once, which means the answers have to already exist as patterns rather than be invented per client.

Underneath it sits one tension that shapes nearly every decision. The workload has to be sustained, and it usually cannot be afforded at the size the textbook recommends.

These businesses need availability, backups, monitoring and security that hold up to their own customers and auditors, on a budget that will not carry a multi-region deployment or an on-call rota.

More often than not, nobody there has “cloud” as a full-time job

There is no platform team absorbing the operational load, and no appetite for a rearchitecture in eighteen months because the first design assumed money that never arrived.

So the work is closing that gap without pretending it does not exist. Right-sizing rather than over-provisioning for a scale that may never come, but leaving the path to scale open. Automating the operational load that a larger company would simply hire for.

Being explicit about the tradeoffs, including the ones where cost wins over resilience, so the customer chooses them knowingly instead of discovering them during an outage.

That is the opposite of what happens when a partner takes an enterprise blueprint and shrinks it. Shrinking a blueprint keeps the assumptions and removes the budget, which is how a smaller company ends up with an architecture it cannot afford to run and cannot afford to replace.

What gets checked for the SMB Competency

Alongside the sales evidence, AWS reviews four production customer deployments from the past 18 months, at least two of them published publicly, and audits them against the Well-Architected Framework.

Architecture diagrams showing how the design scales and stays available
Root account MFA and CloudTrail across all regions
Least-privilege IAM with dedicated credentials per engineer
Encryption at rest and in transit with managed keys
Infrastructure as code, with production changes not made through the console
Defined RTO and RPO targets with an explained recovery path
Workload health KPIs, runbooks and deployment checklists
TCO modelling delivered to the customer before implementation, not after

Then the practice-level requirements, several of which are specific to serving smaller companies:

A public catalogue of service offerings spanning consulting and strategy, migration, security and cost optimisation, and generative AI
Every solution design reviewed and signed off by an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional
Automated patch management, demonstrated on video rather than described
Contracts that define data ownership and offboarding up front: handover timelines, transfer formats, and how IAM accounts, roles and federation get removed when the engagement ends
A governance framework for tracking whether customers actually realise the business benefits they were promised

That fourth one deserves attention. AWS requires partners to document, in writing, how a customer leaves.

For a company without in-house cloud staff, the exit terms are a genuine risk, and asking about them early is the single best filter a smaller buyer has when choosing a partner.

Small and medium businesses hold the business world

SMBs solve some of the most interesting problems out there, and they need cloud solutions built for their actual constraints rather than scaled-down enterprise blueprints.

We provide delivery model built for companies where every architectural decision has a visible cost and nobody has time to run a platform team on the side. This claim is now verified through the AWS Small and Medium Business Competency.

Feel free to visit our case study section, where you can find out more about our work and results our clients achieved. For example, we helped Lighthouse cut their cloud costs by 22% and accelerated their pipeline by 30%.

Schedule a session with an AWS Hero and find out what your AWS setup should look like at your size.