AWS Partner Central Migration Deadline: September 30, 2026 — What Every APN Member Must Do Now
The clock is running. AWS has set September 30, 2026 as the hard shutdown date for the legacy AWS Partner Network portal, and the company has indicated no intention to extend the deadline. Every member of the AWS Partner Network — ISVs, consulting partners, managed service providers, resellers, and distributors — must complete migration to the new Partner Central experience in the AWS Management Console before that date or lose access to the operational tools that drive their AWS business. AWS announced the availability of Partner Central in the AWS Management Console in November 2025, opening a migration window of approximately ten months. That window now has roughly five weeks remaining.
What Is Being Shut Down
The legacy APN portal — the standalone web application that has served as the primary interface for partner program management since the early years of the AWS Partner Network — will become inaccessible on September 30, 2026. This is not a soft deprecation where the old portal persists in read-only mode. After that date, partners who have not completed the migration will be locked out of ACE opportunity submission, co-sell pipeline management, reseller relationship approvals, deal registration, funding dashboards, and AWS Marketplace solution metadata management. The work of running an AWS channel program, in other words, will require the new environment from day one of Q4 2026.
What Partner Central 3.0 Changes
The migration is not simply a cosmetic rebrand of the existing portal. Partner Central 3.0 consolidates tools that were previously spread across separate interfaces into a single, IAM-governed environment within the AWS Management Console. ACE co-sell and opportunity management, AWS Marketplace listing and solution management, MDF and funding dashboards, program benefit tracking, and certification status — all of these are now accessible under a unified interface using the same AWS IAM roles that govern the rest of a partner's AWS environment.
The IAM governance model is a meaningful operational shift. Access to partner program functions is now tied to IAM policies and roles rather than to separate username-and-password credentials for the APN portal. For channel partners managing multiple team members across sales, alliances, and operations, this means partner access management is brought into the same identity and permissions framework used for AWS infrastructure access — a simplification for mature AWS environments, but a new configuration requirement for teams that treated the APN portal as an isolated system with its own access controls.
Partner Central 3.0 also introduces an API layer that partners can use to integrate opportunity data, co-sell pipeline updates, and program status information into their own CRM and partner relationship management systems. Ecosystem tooling vendors including Labra and WorkSpan have documented the migration path and are offering migration assistance, including help connecting existing co-sell workflows to the new API endpoints. For partners who have built custom integrations with the legacy APN, that tooling may be the fastest path to operational continuity.
Who Is Affected and How Much Work Is Required
The scope of migration effort varies significantly depending on how a partner has structured their AWS program operations.
Partners who primarily used the APN portal manually — logging in to update opportunities, check certification status, or submit deal registrations — face a relatively straightforward migration. The core task is establishing IAM roles and permissions for the relevant team members in the AWS Management Console, then completing a guided migration flow that transfers the partner's existing program data, benefits, and certifications into the new environment. Partners who recently linked Marketplace listings to co-sell opportunities in Partner Central may find that a significant portion of their data is already positioned for the migration.
Partners who built programmatic integrations with the legacy APN face more complexity. The legacy portal's API used a different schema and authentication model than Partner Central 3.0. Any custom logic tied to the old opportunity management endpoints — including CRM sync workflows, automated deal registration triggers, Salesforce or HubSpot integrations, or reporting pipelines that pull co-sell data from the APN — will require rearchitecting to function with the new API. For partners where the co-sell motion is deeply embedded in their sales operations tooling, this is not a weekend task.
Distributors managing large indirect partner portfolios carry an additional coordination burden: they must confirm that each of their reseller and value-added reseller partners has also completed migration, since a reseller relationship in Partner Central requires both parties to be operating in the new environment for reseller approval workflows and deal registration to function correctly.
The Cost of Missing the Deadline
Missing the September 30 deadline does not mean a partner loses their AWS Partnership status or their certifications. It means they lose access to the operational infrastructure of the program. An MSP that cannot submit ACE opportunities cannot participate in co-sell. A reseller that cannot access the deal registration interface cannot protect margins on registered deals. An ISV that cannot manage Marketplace solution metadata cannot update pricing, listing details, or private offers. The program continues to exist; the ability to work within it does not.
For partners with active co-sell pipelines and pending deal registrations, a gap in portal access at the start of Q4 — the most commercially significant quarter for most enterprise software deals — carries compounding risk. AWS has not indicated any grace period or exception process for partners who miss the deadline.
Action Items Before September 30
The migration checklist is straightforward, but execution requires coordination across multiple teams. The specific steps that should be completed before the deadline include: establishing the correct IAM roles and permissions in the AWS Management Console for all team members who need partner portal access; completing the guided migration flow in Partner Central that transfers existing certifications, program benefits, and opportunity data; verifying that existing co-sell opportunities, open ACE submissions, and pending deal registrations have migrated correctly; and updating any external integrations that connect the APN portal to CRM or operations systems to authenticate against the Partner Central 3.0 API.
Partners who have built bespoke integrations with the legacy APN API and need to rearchitect those workflows to function with the new API endpoints may benefit from external engineering support. The custom software development work required to migrate a custom co-sell integration — new OAuth flows, updated data schema mappings, revised webhook configurations — is well-defined but requires development capacity that many channel operations teams do not have in-house. Engaging outside engineering resources is a viable path to meeting the deadline without diverting internal product or infrastructure capacity.
Channel leaders who manage AWS partnership alongside Azure and GCP programs should also use the migration as an opportunity to review how their cross-hyperscaler tooling is structured. Managing multiple hyperscaler partner programs simultaneously becomes significantly more complex when the operational interfaces and API schemas differ across vendors. Establishing a unified data model for co-sell pipeline management across all three hyperscalers, anchored on the new Partner Central 3.0 structure on the AWS side, can reduce the ongoing overhead of multi-cloud channel operations once the September 30 transition is complete.
Sources
AWS Partner Central is now available in the AWS Management Console (aws.amazon.com, November 2025) · AWS Partner Central Migration Guide (Labra, 2026) · AWS Partner Central 3.0 Migration Guide (WorkSpan, 2026)