aws·Aug 10, 2026·3 min readCurated summary

AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Heroes Summit, Web Search on Amazon Bedrock, Dogwood, Kiro Crew, and more (August 10, 2026) | Amazon Web Services

The August 10, 2026 AWS Weekly Roundup highlights the AWS Heroes Summit and several launches focused on AI agents, modernization, data retrieval, and developer productivity. Major updates include web search for Amazon Bedrock, vector search in DynamoDB, dedicated AgentCore runtime instances, and faster Lambda networking. AWS also introduced Dogwood for temporal agent governance, portable Agent Plugins, and Kiro Crew for persistent multi-agent development. ## AWS Heroes Summit - AWS Heroes from around the world gathered for technical collaboration, deep dives, and feedback sessions with AWS teams. - The invite-only event featured: - A fireside chat with AWS CEO Matt Garman. - An AMA with James Hamilton. - Breakout sessions led by AWS product teams. - The summit emphasized knowledge sharing, community support, and collaboration between AWS experts and internal teams. ## New Amazon Bedrock and AI Capabilities - **Web Search on Amazon Bedrock** - OpenAI models, including GPT-5.4, GPT-5.5, and GPT-5.6 variants, can browse and retrieve current information from the internet. - Applications can use real-time web content while keeping data within a secured AWS environment with zero data egress. - **Runtime Instances for Bedrock AgentCore** - AI agents can run on dedicated runtime instances. - This provides more predictable performance, execution control, and costs. - **Vector Search for DynamoDB** - Applications can store and query vector embeddings alongside existing DynamoDB data. - This supports semantic retrieval and grounding for AI agents without deploying a separate vector database. ## Modernization and Lambda Networking - **AWS Transform continuous modernization** - Now generally available for analyzing and remediating technical debt across repositories. - Supports ongoing modernization of mainframe and legacy workloads rather than one-time migration projects. - Integrates with the AWS Transform Kiro Power and agent plugins. - **Higher Lambda bandwidth** - Lambda functions configured with at least 2 GB of memory and running outside a VPC can receive proportional network bandwidth increases. - Bandwidth ranges from 625 Mbps at 2 GB to 3,000 Mbps at 10 GB. - The change benefits data-intensive workloads and communication with other AWS services. ## Agent Governance and Portability - **Dogwood** - AWS open-sourced Dogwood, a governance language designed for AI agents. - It extends Cedar policies with temporal conditions. - AgentCore temporal policies can make decisions based on an agent’s prior actions within a session, not only the current request. - **Agent Plugins** - AWS supports an open, vendor-neutral specification for packaging agent extensions. - Developers can package an extension once and use it across compatible tools such as Kiro, VS Code, and Cursor. ## Kiro Crew - Kiro Crew provides a persistent workspace for collaborative, multi-agent development. - It is designed for work spanning multiple repositories, tools, and days rather than a single chat session. - Developers can run several efforts in parallel or delegate tasks to subagents that report results later. AWS’s latest updates point toward more capable, governed, and portable AI-agent workflows, while also improving modernization tools and infrastructure performance. Developers can explore the related documentation, AWS events, and the AWS Builder Center for further resources.

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AWSAI AgentsAmazon BedrockAws Lambda+4

cloudflare·Jul 28, 2026·3 min readCurated summary

Natural disasters and government interference: examining Q2 2026’s major Internet disruption event

Cloudflare’s Q2 2026 outage review shows how dependent Internet connectivity remains on physical infrastructure, government policy, and complex technical systems. Disruptions ranged from typhoons, earthquakes, and power failures to shutdowns, war-related data-center damage, DNSSEC errors, and submarine cable cuts. Despite these failures, regional networks generally remained resilient, with Cloudflare Radar revealing both the scale and distinctive patterns of each outage. ### Natural Disasters and Power Failures - Super Typhoon Sinlaku passed north of Guam in April, causing power and water disruptions. - Internet traffic fell as much as 80% below expected levels on April 13–14. - Two earthquakes in northern Venezuela on June 24 produced an immediate drop in HTTP traffic. - The decline was especially visible at Fibex Telecom, CANTV, and VNET. - A nationwide power outage in Tanzania on June 27 caused Internet traffic to collapse for at least five hours. - These events demonstrate that storms, earthquakes, and electricity failures can produce similar connectivity impacts, reinforcing the need for redundancy in power, routing, and physical network paths. ### Government Shutdowns and Geopolitical Conflict - Iran began restoring Internet access on May 26 after an 88-day near-total blackout. - Traffic initially recovered to about 40% of pre-outage levels, later reaching 90% before settling near 59%. - Connectivity returned closer to the country’s recent pre-shutdown baseline, rather than fully normal levels. - AWS’s `me-central-1` region in the UAE continued to experience reduced traffic after drone strikes damaged infrastructure in the UAE and Bahrain. - The disruption affected applications hosted in the region even when those applications themselves remained operational. - Iraq imposed three exam-related shutdowns, while Sudan imposed ten. - Sudan’s outages generally lasted about 3.5 hours. - Iraq’s shutdowns lasted roughly 90 minutes. - These incidents illustrate how governments can deliberately switch off, throttle, or selectively restore national connectivity. ### DNSSEC Failure in Germany - On May 5, a DNSSEC key rollover at DENIC caused invalid signatures for Germany’s `.de` domain. - DNS resolvers validating DNSSEC rejected `.de` responses and returned `SERVFAIL`, making affected websites unreachable worldwide until service was restored at 23:15 UTC on May 5. - Cloudflare observed an increase in `.de` queries because failed responses could not be effectively cached, forcing repeated lookups and retries. - Users experienced the incident as widespread website unavailability rather than as an obvious cryptographic or DNS problem. ### Cable and Infrastructure Vulnerabilities - A submarine cable cut in Saint Lucia further demonstrated how regional connectivity can depend on a small number of physical links. - Together with the German DNSSEC failure, the incident shows that routine infrastructure maintenance and single physical-path failures can have effects far beyond the location where the fault occurs. Cloudflare’s findings underline the importance of network redundancy, careful operational procedures, and continuous monitoring. Internet outages may have very different causes, but their effects on users can look remarkably similar: sudden loss of access to communication, applications, and essential information.

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aws·Jul 27, 2026·3 min readCurated summary

AWS Weekly Roundup: Local Zone in Athens, Claude Opus 5 on AWS, Lambda durable execution for .NET, and more (July 27, 2026) | Amazon Web Services

The week’s AWS updates focus on bringing infrastructure closer to users, expanding AI capabilities, and improving reliability and observability. Highlights include a new Athens Local Zone, Claude Opus 5 availability, durable Lambda workflows for .NET, and unified Amazon Bedrock AgentCore telemetry. The post also points to new data, contact-center, developer-productivity, and community resources. ## AWS Local Zone in Athens - AWS launched its second EMEA Local Zone in Athens, Greece. - It supports: - Amazon EC2 C7i, M7i, and R7i instances - Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access - Amazon EBS and EBS Local Snapshots - Amazon ECS - Greek organizations can process and store data locally to help satisfy data-residency requirements. - The zone enables single-digit-millisecond latency for workloads such as gaming, media production, and financial services while still connecting to the nearest AWS Region. ## New AI and Serverless Capabilities - **Claude Opus 5 on AWS** is available through Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS. - It provides top-tier Opus-level intelligence. - Bedrock enables zero data retention by default, supporting stricter governance requirements. - **Lambda durable execution for .NET** is now generally available. - C# developers can create long-running, multi-step workflows without custom checkpointing or external orchestration. - Workflows can pause for up to one year. - Use cases include payment pipelines, AI agents, and human approvals. ## Improved Agent Observability - Amazon Bedrock AgentCore now stores traces, prompts, inputs, outputs, and application logs in a single CloudWatch log group. - Engineers can investigate individual agent invocations without searching multiple destinations. - Agent-level access controls and customer-managed key encryption are also supported. ## Contact Center, Data, and Developer Updates - Amazon Connect added more natural agentic voice experiences across more than 50 languages. - The service now includes over 100 new voice options and improved handling of tone and sentiment. - SageMaker Unified Studio can query Amazon OpenSearch data alongside Redshift, S3, and relational database assets. - CloudWatch coding agent insights measures the organizational impact of tools such as Claude Code, Codex, and GitHub Copilot using OpenTelemetry telemetry without custom instrumentation. ## Additional Resources and Events - AWS published guidance for evaluating AI agents with Strands Agents and Bedrock AgentCore. - A new guide covers multi-region resiliency for CloudFormation custom resources. - Amazon SES introduced pricing plans intended to make large-scale email costs more predictable. - Upcoming opportunities include AWS Summits and AWS Community Day Belo Horizonte on August 22. Together, these releases suggest AWS is prioritizing lower-latency regional infrastructure, production-ready AI workflows, and better operational visibility. Builders should assess the Athens Local Zone for residency-sensitive workloads, consider durable Lambda execution for complex .NET processes, and adopt the new observability tools as agent deployments grow.

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AWSAmazon BedrockAws LambdaAmazon Sagemaker+4

slack·Jul 14, 2026·3 min readCurated summary

Shipyard: How We Built Slack’s Next-Generation EC2 Platform

Slack’s Shipyard is a next-generation EC2 platform that replaces continuously modified, long-lived instances with immutable, deployable infrastructure artifacts. It combines layered machine images, service-level deployments, progressive rollouts, automated rollback, and short-lived instances to make EC2 operations more predictable and secure. The platform preserves EC2’s flexibility for workloads that cannot easily move to containers while adopting modern application-delivery practices. ## Why Slack Built Shipyard - Slack previously improved its Chef infrastructure with: - Multiple resilient Chef stacks - Versioned cookbook deployments - Safer promotion workflows - Split production environments and signal-based Chef runs - Despite these improvements, the traditional model of continuously updating instances still caused: - Infrastructure drift - Difficult service-level deployments - Coordination problems across infrastructure layers - Increasing operational complexity - Shipyard shifts infrastructure management from mutable instances and constant configuration enforcement to build pipelines, deployable artifacts, and automated safety mechanisms. ## Shipyard’s Core Capabilities - Supports AMD64 and ARM-based Graviton processors. - Supports Ubuntu, RHEL, and Amazon Linux. - Targets workloads that cannot easily migrate to containers, including: - Infrastructure services - Kubernetes worker nodes - Egress network stacks - Integrates with Slack’s Gondola deployment orchestrator for progressive rollouts. - Uses service health metrics to automatically pause deployments or roll back to a known-good version. - Uses layered images so instances perform less work during startup and provision quickly and consistently across regions. ## Configuration Management Without Continuous Mutation - Under the previous model, scheduled Chef jobs repeatedly checked and reapplied configuration. - Shipyard applies configuration during defined lifecycle stages, primarily: - Image baking - Initial instance provisioning - Service deployment - Configuration management tools no longer continuously modify the entire running system. - This reduces background workload, prevents unexpected overwrites, and makes instance behavior easier to understand. ## Fleet Inventory with Peekaboo - Shipyard introduces Peekaboo, a near-real-time inventory system for EC2. - Peekaboo uses AWS EventBridge, OpenSearch, and Lambda to collect cloud events and instance metadata. - It provides: - A fleet-exploration UI - An API for integrations - A command-line interface - Unlike Chef Server, Peekaboo is not limited to Shipyard-managed instances and can provide visibility across the entire EC2 fleet. ## Short-Lived Immutable Instances - Shipyard regularly rotates instances instead of relying on in-place updates. - Limited instance lifespans: - Reduce the window in which vulnerabilities can persist - Prevent long-term configuration drift - Encourage teams to replace instances rather than repair them manually - This makes infrastructure more closely resemble immutable application artifacts. ## The `slack-zero` Golden Image - `slack-zero` is Slack’s shared foundational AMI, maintained by the Compute Platform Team with security and monitoring teams. - It includes: - Operating-system hardening - Networking and service discovery - Monitoring and security agents - Common tools and foundational configuration - Service-specific images are built on top of `slack-zero`, similar to layering application images on a Docker base image. - When foundational components change, Slack produces a new immutable base image and rebuilds downstream service images to inherit updates. ## AWS Image Builder - Slack uses AWS Image Builder instead of Packer to create `slack-zero`. - Image Builder provides lifecycle policies that automatically remove old AMIs and reduce storage costs. - Each new image publishes its latest AMI identifier through an AWS Systems Manager parameter, helping downstream systems discover the current base image. Shipyard’s central recommendation is to treat EC2 infrastructure as versioned, replaceable artifacts rather than mutable machines. Combining trusted base images, automated provisioning, metric-driven deployment controls, fleet-wide inventory, and scheduled instance replacement gives Slack safer and more predictable EC2 operations at scale.

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AWSAmazon Ec2OpensearchChef+4

aws·Jul 13, 2026·3 min readCurated summary

Amazon SQS turns 20: Two decades of reliable messaging at scale | Amazon Web Services

Amazon SQS has spent two decades helping distributed systems communicate asynchronously without tightly coupling services. While its core purpose remains unchanged—decoupling producers and consumers, buffering traffic, and isolating failures—its scale, security, integrations, and workload support have expanded significantly. Recent improvements also make SQS suitable for high-throughput, multi-tenant, and AI-driven architectures. ## SQS’s Core Role in Distributed Systems - Producers place messages in queues and continue processing without waiting for consumers. - Consumers process messages when they are ready, preventing slow or unavailable services from causing cascading failures. - Customers use SQS to: - Decouple application components - Absorb traffic bursts - Improve resilience when individual services fail - Coordinate independent services and AI agents ## Higher Throughput for FIFO Queues - High-throughput FIFO mode launched in 2021 at up to 3,000 transactions per second per API action. - Capacity increased progressively to: - 6,000 TPS in 2022 - 9,000 TPS in 2023 - 18,000 TPS later in 2023 - Up to 70,000 TPS per API action in select Regions - The FIFO in-flight message limit grew from 20,000 to 120,000 in 2024, enabling more concurrent processing. ## Stronger Security and Access Controls - SSE-SQS launched in 2021, providing server-side encryption with AWS-managed keys and eliminating customer key-management requirements. - Encryption became the default for newly created queues in 2022. - Attribute-based access control was introduced in 2022, allowing permissions to be based on queue tags rather than static resource policies. ## Improved Message Recovery and Integration - Dead-letter queue redrive became available in the SQS console in 2021. - SDK and CLI APIs—including `StartMessageMoveTask`, `CancelMessageMoveTask`, and `ListMessageMoveTasks`—followed in 2023. - FIFO queue redrive support was added later that year. - JSON protocol support reduced processing latency by up to 23% for 5 KB payloads while lowering client CPU and memory use. - SQS queues can connect directly to EventBridge Pipes, enabling routing to many AWS services without custom integration code. ## Larger Messages and Fairer Queuing - The Extended Client Library for Python allows payloads up to 2 GB by storing message data in Amazon S3 and sending a reference through SQS. - In 2025, the native maximum message size increased from 256 KiB to 1 MiB for standard and FIFO queues. - Fair queues help prevent one tenant in a shared standard queue from delaying others. Producers provide a message group ID, while consumers require no changes. ## SQS for AI Workloads - SQS can buffer requests to large language models and regulate inference throughput. - Queues also help coordinate autonomous AI agents that operate as separate services. - These use cases apply the same established messaging model to more complex, distributed AI systems. Amazon SQS’s recommendation remains straightforward: use asynchronous queues when systems need loose coupling, burst management, and resilience. Its newer throughput, security, recovery, integration, and fairness features extend that pattern to larger and more demanding applications.

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AWSDistributed SystemsAmazon S3Amazon Sqs+4

aws·Jul 13, 2026·4 min readCurated summary

AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Builder Center at 1 year, Network Scanning in Security Hub, Loom for AWS, and more (July 13, 2026) | Amazon Web Services

AWS’s weekly roundup highlights the first anniversary of AWS Builder Center and its expansion into a broader learning and experimentation ecosystem. It also introduces major security, AI, container, database, and developer-tool updates, including internet reachability scanning, Azure support in Security Hub, Hugging Face integration with SageMaker, lower GPU management fees, and Aurora DSQL change data capture. The overall direction is toward more integrated, governed, and accessible cloud development workflows. ## AWS Builder Center Turns One - Launched on July 9, 2025, Builder Center has expanded from a community hub into an ecosystem with: - Sandbox environments - Workshops and the Builders’ Library - Community Spaces, profiles, badges, and streaks - AWS regional capability listings - Saved items, article series, availability notifications, and GitHub/Amazon sign-in - In its first year: - 5,548 authors published 6,448 articles. - Articles received more than 10.4 million page views. - Builders earned 99,226 badges. - The community submitted 565 feature wishes, with 10 already delivered. - The most popular articles covered MCP and Strands Agents, Linux migration with Kiro, and multimodal AI for neurological screening. ## Free AWS Sandbox Environments - Builder Center now offers free, pre-provisioned AWS accounts for workshop exercises. - Each sandbox: - Remains active for eight hours. - Automatically removes the account and resources afterward. - Requires no personal AWS account, credit card, or manual cleanup. - Users can have one active sandbox and request one sandbox per week. ## Security Hub Adds Network and Azure Coverage - Security Hub Network Scanning probes AWS and Azure environments from the public internet. - It identifies: - Public IP addresses, virtual machines, and load balancers. - Reachable ports. - Services operating behind those ports. - Each reachable port produces a finding, which Security Hub Exposures correlates with other configuration and security findings. - Existing customers can enable the feature by account, Region, or organization policy; it is enabled by default for new customers. - Network Scanning is included with Security Hub Essentials at no extra cost. - Security Hub also now evaluates Azure VMs, container images, Function Apps, and identities for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and internet exposure. ## SageMaker Studio and Hugging Face Integration - Users can deploy or customize supported Hugging Face models in SageMaker Studio with one click. - New customers receive automatically configured Studio environments for: - Fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with custom reward functions. - Model evaluation. - Deployment to SageMaker or Bedrock endpoints. - Verified customers receive default GPU access to G5, G6, and G4dn instances, while quota usage is visible in Studio. ## Lower GPU Management Fees - Starting July 1, 2026, EKS Auto Mode and ECS Managed Instances reduced accelerated-instance management fees: - G-series: 35% reduction. - P-series and Trainium: 60% reduction. - Existing customers receive the reductions automatically. - EKS adds accelerator-aware node repair and parallel image pulling. - ECS provides GPU metrics through CloudWatch Container Insights and monitors GPU hardware health. ## Aurora DSQL Change Data Capture - Aurora DSQL CDC is generally available and streams insert, update, and delete events to Kinesis Data Streams. - The events can synchronize microservices, invoke Lambda functions, or feed S3, Redshift, and OpenSearch through Firehose. - CDC is designed to avoid database performance impact and requires no infrastructure management. ## Tools for Governed AI Agents - Loom for AWS is an open-source platform for deploying and managing Strands Agents on Bedrock AgentCore Runtime. - It includes: - Identity-provider integration and RBAC/ABAC. - Lifecycle management for agents, memory, MCP servers, and agent-to-agent connections. - Automated tagging for cost attribution. - Agent Registry integration and human approval for sensitive actions. - The Claude apps gateway provides centralized access, policy, and spending controls for Claude Code and Claude Desktop. - It supports OIDC identity providers, per-user and per-group spending caps, managed request settings, and routing through Amazon Bedrock or Claude Platform on AWS. - AWS MCP Server now supports browser-based OAuth using AWS Console or CLI credentials, including IAM federation and IAM Identity Center, with short-lived tokens and automatic refresh. AWS’s updates favor managed services that reduce operational work while strengthening security and governance. Teams should evaluate Builder Center sandboxes for training, enable Security Hub’s broader scanning where appropriate, and consider the new AI-agent controls and managed GPU options for production workloads.

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aws·Jul 6, 2026·3 min readCurated summary

AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Sonnet 5 on AWS, Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents, AWS service availability updates, and more (July 6, 2026) | Amazon Web Services

The July 6, 2026 AWS roundup highlights new infrastructure, AI, observability, and developer productivity capabilities. Major announcements include Claude Sonnet 5 on AWS, generally available WorkSpaces for AI agents, faster SageMaker inference scaling, and log-query alarms in CloudWatch. It also details AWS service lifecycle changes and upcoming community events. ## Featured AWS Launches - **Claude Sonnet 5 on AWS** - Anthropic’s latest Sonnet model is available for coding, agentic workflows, and professional tasks. - It can navigate large codebases, use tools accurately, and preserve state across long-running tasks. - **Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents** - AI agents can securely operate desktop applications in managed WorkSpaces environments. - Organizations can use existing applications without modernization or custom integrations. - **OpenSearch log analytics optimization** - A new engine provides up to four times better price-performance in internal benchmarks. - It combines log aggregation with OpenSearch’s full-text search capabilities. - **Faster SageMaker AI inference scaling** - Container image caching can reduce generative AI scale-out time by up to half. - SageMaker supports up to two times faster end-to-end scaling during demand increases. - **CloudWatch alarms from log queries** - Users can create alarms directly from log query results and define thresholds in one workflow. - This removes the need to create metric filters or custom metrics first. ## Additional Infrastructure and Developer Updates - **EC2 C9g and C9gd instances** - Powered by AWS Graviton5 processors. - Offer up to 25% more compute performance than Graviton4 instances, five times more cache, faster memory, and optional local NVMe storage. - **CloudFormation Express mode** - Provides deployment confirmation within seconds. - Helps developers and AI agents iterate more quickly, at no additional cost in commercial Regions. - **Amazon EKS version rollbacks** - Kubernetes upgrades can be reversed within seven days. - Rollbacks avoid rebuilding clusters and reduce the risk of failed upgrades. - **ACME support in AWS Certificate Manager** - Automates issuance and renewal of public TLS certificates using the standard ACME protocol. ## AWS Service Availability Changes AWS updated its lifecycle guidance on June 30, 2026, including alternatives and migration support. - **Moving to maintenance for new customers from July 30** - Amazon Bedrock Agents becomes Bedrock Agents Classic. - Amazon Cognito Sync, Amazon Kendra, Amazon Q Business, Simple AD, and several other services and features will no longer accept new customers. - A number of SageMaker AI features are affected, including Clarify, Debugger, Ground Truth, Model Monitor, and Studio Lab. - AWS IoT Device Defender Detect changes on August 31, 2026. - **Entering sunset** - Amazon WorkSpaces PCoIP and Pool. - AWS Managed Services Advanced. - AWS re:Post Private. - SageMaker AI Profiler. - **End of support** - Amazon Chime SDK Carrier Voice Focus. - SageMaker AI Ground Truth Plus. ## Upcoming AWS Events - AWS Summits will take place throughout the second half of 2026. - AWS Community Day Belo Horizonte is scheduled for August 22. - The AWS Builder Center offers community discussions, technical content, and information about upcoming virtual and in-person events. Organizations using affected AWS services should review the relevant lifecycle documentation and contact AWS Support to plan migrations before availability or support deadlines.

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AWSKubernetesAmazon SagemakerAmazon Eks+4

aws·Jul 1, 2026·2 min readCurated summary

Upgrade Amazon EKS clusters with confidence using Kubernetes version rollbacks | Amazon Web Services

Amazon EKS now supports rolling back Kubernetes minor-version upgrades within seven days, providing a safety net that open-source Kubernetes traditionally lacks. The rollback returns a cluster to its previously validated production version rather than placing it in an emulated transitional state. This can help organizations upgrade more confidently, reduce lengthy upgrade cycles, and avoid remaining on outdated versions. ## Kubernetes Version Rollbacks - Rollbacks support one minor version at a time, matching EKS upgrade behavior. - Administrators can revert an upgrade such as Kubernetes 1.35 to 1.34 within the seven-day rollback window. - EKS uses cluster insights to check rollback readiness, including: - Node version compatibility - Add-on dependencies - Other potential upgrade issues - The `--force` option bypasses these checks when administrators need to proceed quickly. - The capability applies to both self-managed-node clusters and clusters using AWS-managed infrastructure. ## EKS Auto Mode Rollbacks - EKS Auto Mode must roll back both the control plane and managed nodes. - Node rollback operations honor pod disruption budgets, so completion time depends on workload configuration. - A cancel API allows administrators to stop an in-progress node rollback. - Disruption budgets are never bypassed automatically; users can modify or remove them if they need to accelerate the process. ## Rollback Experience and Availability - Rollbacks can be initiated from the EKS console after selecting an eligible cluster. - The console displays the remaining rollback window and relevant readiness insights. - In the example, the control plane rollback took about 20 minutes, while Auto Mode nodes rolled back according to their disruption budgets. - Rollbacks are available at no additional cost in all commercial AWS Regions where EKS operates. - Control plane rollbacks support all EKS clusters; node rollbacks are available for EKS Auto Mode. - Supported Kubernetes versions include those under standard or extended EKS support. Administrators can use the EKS console or documentation to begin using rollbacks, making incremental Kubernetes upgrades safer and easier to recover from.

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AWSKubernetesAmazon EksEks Auto Mode+3

aws·Jun 29, 2026·3 min readCurated summary

AWS Weekly Roundup: Agentic CX designer for Amazon Connect Customer, EC2 AMI Watermarks, Open Governance for MySQL, and more (June 29, 2026) | Amazon Web Services

The AWS Weekly Roundup highlights tools aimed at making AI, infrastructure management, and cloud operations faster and more accessible. The main announcement is Amazon Connect Customer’s no-code Agentic CX designer, which lets business teams create governed AI customer experiences without relying on lengthy engineering backlogs. Other updates cover isolated serverless compute, AMI governance, guided migrations, AI-assisted security investigations, and broader community initiatives. ## Agentic Customer Experience Design - Amazon Connect Customer launched the Agentic CX designer (NLX) in preview. - The no-code canvas enables business teams to design, test, simulate, and deploy voice and digital self-service experiences. - It combines agentic and deterministic AI within a governed workflow. - AWS also introduced Live Sync in preview, allowing web or mobile interfaces to update in real time as customers speak or type. - Customers could, for example, complete forms or open product pages while continuing a voice conversation. ## New AWS Infrastructure and Operations Features - **AWS Lambda MicroVMs** - Provides VM-level isolation with near-instant startup and resume times. - Supports suspending and resuming execution for up to eight hours. - Targets multi-tenant applications running user-generated or AI-generated code. - **Amazon EC2 AMI Watermarks** - Embeds custom identifiers in private AMIs. - Watermarks persist across copies, Regions, and account shares. - Works with Allowed AMIs and Declarative Policies to enforce approved-image usage. - **AWS Outposts lifecycle management** - Adds self-service configuration, quoting, ordering, subscription management, renewal, and decommissioning. - A new quoting tool provides rapid cost estimates and identifies account or regional constraints. ## AI-Assisted Developer and Migration Tools - **Amazon MSK AI Agent Skills** gives coding assistants such as Kiro, Claude Code, and Cursor operational guidance for Amazon MSK. - It supports Kafka sizing, configuration, troubleshooting, monitoring, and migrations to MSK Express. - **Amazon OpenSearch Service Migration Assistant** now offers agent-guided migrations from Solr, Elasticsearch, and OpenSearch to managed clusters or OpenSearch Serverless. - The migration tooling adds live traffic capture and replay for Solr workloads. ## AI-Powered Security Investigations - Amazon GuardDuty’s AI-powered investigations entered preview. - It analyzes findings, account context, related activity from the previous 90 days, knowledge graphs, and threat intelligence. - Investigations produce confidence-scored assessments, MITRE ATT&CK classifications, and recommended actions to help distinguish real threats from benign activity. ## Open Governance and AWS Community Updates - Oracle announced a community governance model for MySQL, including four non-Oracle seats on a new Steering Committee and a public GitHub presence. - AWS supports the initiative and contributes fixes upstream. - AWS Certification holders can renew eligible Associate and Professional certifications for an additional year through selected Skill Builder training and hands-on labs instead of retaking an exam. - The 2026 All Builders Welcome Grant offers selected early-career builders conference admission, airfare, and lodging for AWS re:Invent. AWS’s latest releases broadly point toward more self-service cloud management: business users can design AI experiences, developers can receive operational guidance from coding assistants, and teams can apply stronger controls to infrastructure and security workflows.

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AWSApache KafkaServerlessAws Lambda+4

aws·Jun 22, 2026·4 min readCurated summary

AWS Weekly Roundup: NY Summit recap, Local Zone in Hanoi, Grok 4.3 in Bedrock, price reductions, and more (June 22, 2026) | Amazon Web Services

AWS’s June 22, 2026 roundup centers on the New York Summit’s focus on AI agents that continuously create value across work, security, software development, and customer applications. It also highlights new regional infrastructure, developer tools, Bedrock models, data capabilities, performance improvements, and several price reductions. Overall, AWS is emphasizing agent-driven automation while lowering barriers and costs for building and operating cloud workloads. ## New York Summit: Agents Across the AWS Stack - **Agents for working:** Amazon Quick supports autonomous, multi-step agents and provides a prioritized activity feed combining email, Slack, calendars, and tasks. - **Agents for securing:** AWS Continuum is an AI-native security service designed to reason about, validate, and remediate vulnerabilities across the development lifecycle. - AWS Security Agent adds threat modeling, pull-request scanning and remediation, and IDE integrations through Kiro, Claude Code, and MCP. - **Agents for building:** Kiro, AWS DevOps Agent, and AWS Transform support continuous coding, deployment, release assessment, and autonomous modernization. - Kiro now includes a native iOS app. - AWS DevOps Agent can evaluate code changes before production release. - **Agents customers create:** Amazon Bedrock AgentCore adds a generally available infrastructure and orchestration harness, Web Search, Managed Knowledge Base, Guardrails integrations, and AWS Context for mapping organizational data relationships. ## New Infrastructure and Developer Services - **AWS Local Zone in Hanoi:** The new `ap-southeast-1-han-1a` zone supports Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS Local Snapshots, helping customers satisfy local data residency and backup requirements. - **AWS Blocks:** This preview open-source TypeScript framework provides a local environment with Postgres, authentication, and real-time messaging without requiring an AWS account. Applications can later deploy to AWS without code changes, with optional CDK integration. - **AWS Management Console Private Access:** Enterprises can access the AWS Console from isolated VPCs without internet connectivity, supporting air-gapped security models. - **AWS Marketplace Storefront:** Partners can publish branded catalogs of AWS Marketplace solutions on their own websites or applications. ## AI, Data, and Agent Capabilities - **Grok 4.3 in Amazon Bedrock:** xAI’s model is available for reasoning, agentic, and enterprise workflows, with tool calling, structured output, and response streaming. - **Amazon S3 annotations:** Objects can now carry up to 1 GB of mutable, queryable context, reducing the need for separate metadata systems in AI-agent and autonomous workflows. - **Strands Agents:** The open-source toolkit adds improved Harness SDK context management, isolated execution through Strands Shell, and chaos testing and red-team capabilities in Strands Evals. - **NVIDIA-powered EC2 G7:** G7 instances use NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs and sixth-generation Intel Xeon processors, delivering up to 4.6 times the AI inference performance and 2.1 times the graphics performance of G6 instances. ## Performance and Security Improvements - **Faster Amazon ECS auto scaling:** Support for 20-second metrics reduces scale-out trigger time from 363 to 86 seconds and total scaling and task provisioning time from 386 to 109 seconds in AWS benchmarks. - **Palo Alto Networks DNS Security:** Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall can apply PANW Advanced DNS Security protections directly, without separate firewalls or VPC changes. ## Price Reductions - **Amazon S3 Vectors:** Query charges for large vector indexes fall by up to 80%, with no application changes required. - **Amazon GameLift Servers:** Generation 6 and newer instances now include free inbound and outbound network bandwidth for both On-Demand and Spot usage. - **AWS Marketplace professional services:** Listing fees drop from 2.5% to 0.5%, reducing transaction costs for consulting, managed services, and software partners. AWS’s latest direction is to combine increasingly autonomous agents with faster infrastructure, broader model choice, stronger security, and lower operating costs. Developers and organizations should evaluate Bedrock AgentCore, AWS Blocks, S3 annotations, and the new regional and private-access options where they can simplify agent development or satisfy data and security requirements.

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AWSAI AgentsGenerative AIPostgreSQL+4

aws·Jun 18, 2026·2 min readCurated summary

Announcing Amazon EC2 G7 instances accelerated by NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs | Amazon Web Services

Amazon EC2 G7 instances are now generally available with NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs and custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon processors. Compared with G6 instances, they provide up to 4.6× higher AI inference performance and 2.1× better graphics performance. AWS positions them for AI inference, rendering, video, virtual desktops, spatial computing, and GPU-accelerated analytics. ## GPU and Performance Improvements - Each GPU provides 32 GB of memory, with up to 256 GB across eight GPUs. - GPU memory capacity is 1.33× higher and bandwidth is 2.45× higher than G6. - GPUs include fifth-generation Tensor Cores and fourth-generation RT Cores. - G7 instances accelerate analytics workloads running on Amazon EMR with Amazon EKS. ## Networking and Storage - Up to 700 Gbps of EFA-enabled networking—seven times the G6 throughput. - Up to 7.6 TB of local NVMe SSD storage keeps large models and datasets close to the GPUs. - Support for NVIDIA GPUDirect P2P and GPUDirect RDMA with EFA enables low-latency GPU communication across GPUs, nodes, and FSx for Lustre. ## Video Processing - Ninth-generation NVENC and sixth-generation NVDEC engines support 4:2:2 encoding and decoding. - They deliver up to 1.5× more concurrent video streams than G6 instances. ## Instance Configurations - Seven instance sizes are available. - Configurations offer up to: - 8 NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 GPUs - 192 vCPUs - 768 GiB of system memory - 700 Gbps network bandwidth - 7.6 TB local NVMe storage - Detailed instance specifications were listed as “coming soon” in the announcement. ## Software and Availability - AWS provides Deep Learning AMIs and NVIDIA Workstation AMIs with preinstalled drivers. - Amazon EKS users should build AMIs with NVIDIA driver version R595. - Supported operating systems include Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, RHEL, and Windows Server. - NVIDIA integration supports DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL. - G7 instances are initially available in US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon). - Purchasing options include On-Demand, Savings Plans, Spot Instances, and Dedicated Instances for selected sizes. G7 instances are a strong option for GPU-intensive workloads requiring higher inference, graphics, networking, and video performance. Organizations can launch them through the EC2 console and evaluate pricing across the available purchasing models.

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AWSKubernetesAmazon Ec2Gpu Acceleration+4

aws·Jun 1, 2026·4 min readCurated summary

AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Opus 4.8 on AWS, Aurora MySQL with Kiro Powers, and more (June 1, 2026) | Amazon Web Services

AWS’s latest roundup highlights a rapid shift toward AI-augmented software development, illustrated by workshops where 17 teams delivered nearly 20 use cases in two days. The centerpiece is Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8, now available through Amazon Bedrock and the Claude Platform on AWS, alongside tools that improve resilience, agentic search, migration analysis, database management, and desktop streaming. Together, these launches show AWS moving toward real-time, AI-assisted development and operations. ## AI-Driven Development and Claude Opus 4.8 - AI-DLC workshops are helping teams deliver software use cases at unprecedented speed, especially when combined with Claude Code on Amazon Bedrock. - Development roles are increasingly consolidating into smaller, AI-augmented teams. - AWS account teams are shifting from producing advisory documents to building solutions collaboratively with customers. - Claude Opus 4.8 is Anthropic’s most capable generally available model and is designed for: - Agentic coding and extended autonomous tasks - Long-document analysis and knowledge work - Deeper reasoning and error recovery - Maintaining context across lengthy coding sessions - On Amazon Bedrock, it includes AWS features such as Guardrails, Knowledge Bases, and data-residency controls. - The Claude Platform on AWS provides Anthropic’s native APIs with unified AWS billing. ## AWS Resilience Hub - The next-generation Resilience Hub provides a unified way to define resilience standards, assess applications, and demonstrate compliance. - Modular policies cover: - Service-level objectives - Multi-Availability Zone and multi-Region disaster recovery - Data recovery - Generative AI assessments align with AWS Well-Architected and Resilience Analysis Framework guidance. - DNS query-log analysis automatically discovers application dependencies. - AWS Organizations integration enables centralized, organization-wide resilience management. ## OpenSearch Serverless for Agentic AI - Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now positioned as a managed search and vector engine for agent-based applications. - It scales from zero to thousands of requests per second and is approximately 20 times faster than the previous generation. - AWS claims up to 60% cost savings compared with peak-provisioned clusters. - New capabilities include GPU acceleration and dedicated `SEARCH` and `VECTORSEARCH` collection types. - OpenSearch Agent Skills integrate with Vercel, Kiro, Claude Code, and Cursor. ## AWS Transform Assessment and Modernization Tools - AWS Transform can build migration business cases and estimate total cost of ownership. - It accepts data from RVTools, CMDBs, AWS discovery tools, and third-party discovery platforms. - Users can model what-if scenarios involving regions, utilization, and service mappings for services such as EC2, FSx, S3, SQL Server on EC2, and virtual desktops. - Agentic Readiness Analysis and Modernization Analysis scan repositories in roughly 5–30 minutes. - Findings include severity levels, file-level evidence, and AWS-specific remediation recommendations. ## Aurora MySQL with Kiro Powers - Aurora MySQL now integrates with Kiro Powers, which provide curated MCP servers, steering files, and hooks. - Developers can use natural language for both: - Data-plane tasks such as queries and schema changes - Control-plane tasks such as cluster administration - The integration offers guidance for Serverless scaling, RDS-to-Aurora migrations, and replication. - Kiro generates the relevant API calls, SQL, and configuration for developer review before execution. - Installation is available through the Kiro IDE or website. ## Windows Desktop Streaming with WorkSpaces Applications - Amazon WorkSpaces Applications now supports bring-your-own-license Windows Desktop OS deployments. - Customers can stream complete Windows desktops and applications from dedicated AWS hardware. - BYOL removes operating-system fees, leaving compute and streaming infrastructure charges. - Eligible Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise are supported. - Users receive a consistent experience across local and streamed desktops. ## Additional AWS News - AWS introduced its May 2026 cohort of AWS Heroes. - A new Vercel and AWS Databases integration allows provisioning Aurora PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, and Aurora DSQL through Vercel or v0. - The H0 hackathon offers $160,000 in prizes for applications built with this stack. - AWS GovCloud customers now receive 24/7 support from US-based, US-citizen engineers automatically, without opting in. AWS’s direction is clear: combine capable AI agents with managed infrastructure, developer tools, and operational automation. Teams evaluating these services should focus on practical agentic use cases while retaining review and governance for generated code, infrastructure changes, and database operations.

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AWSAI AgentsAmazon BedrockClaude Opus+4

aws·May 27, 2026·2 min readCurated summary

Meet Our Newest AWS Heroes – May 2026 | Amazon Web Services

AWS has named four new Heroes for May 2026, recognizing leaders who advance cloud, AI, serverless, and community education. Their work ranges from building Amazon Bedrock-powered tools and contributing to AWS certifications to organizing major user groups and events across Europe and Latin America. Together, they demonstrate how technical expertise and community leadership can help more builders adopt AWS. ## Damiano Giorgi — Pavia, Italy - An Artificial Intelligence Hero and Cloud Solutions Architect specializing in AI. - Helps organize AWS User Groups in Pavia and Milan. - Created the “Unofficial post:Invent Session Suggester,” using Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Nova to recommend re:Invent sessions. - Shares knowledge through his “Bass and Bytes” blog and conferences across Europe. ## Darryl Ruggles — Ottawa, Canada - A Serverless Hero and Cloud Solutions Architect with a background in software development. - Focuses on AWS application architecture, AI/ML, serverless, containers, and FinOps. - Publishes blog posts, LinkedIn content, and open projects. - Participates actively in online communities such as “Believe In Serverless” and in-person AWS events. ## Ricardo Daniel Ceci — Buenos Aires, Argentina - An Artificial Intelligence Hero leading the AWS User Group Buenos Aires, with nearly 2,400 members. - Principal organizer of AWS Community Day Argentina. - Named AWS Community Leader of the Year 2025 for Latin America. - Hosts a podcast with cloud experts, AWS Heroes, and developer advocates. - Works to make cloud and AI more accessible to Spanish-speaking builders across LATAM. ## Matias Kreder — Buenos Aires, Argentina - An Artificial Intelligence Hero and AWS Certification Subject Matter Expert. - Contributed to AI/ML certifications, including the AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam. - Began his community involvement through AWS DeepRacer, qualifying as a finalist three times. - Organizes racing events, ML talks, and AWS community activities across Latin America. - Helped organize AWS Community Day Argentina 2025 and speaks at regional events. These new Heroes illustrate the value of combining AWS expertise with mentorship, content creation, certification work, and community organizing. Builders can learn more or connect with regional leaders through the AWS Heroes program.

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AWSAIMachine LearningAmazon Bedrock+4

aws·May 25, 2026·3 min readCurated summary

AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Local Zones in Istanbul, open-source ExtendDB, Kiro Web, and more (May 25, 2026) | Amazon Web Services

AWS’s latest updates focus on expanding regional infrastructure, improving developer workflows, and making cloud and AI services more portable. The Istanbul Local Zone strengthens data residency and low-latency capabilities in Türkiye, while tools such as ExtendDB, OpenAI-compatible SageMaker APIs, and Kiro Web reduce migration and development friction. Together, these releases emphasize flexibility, operational resilience, and easier local testing. ## AWS Local Zone in Istanbul - AWS opened a new Local Zone in Istanbul, Türkiye. - It provides nearby compute, storage, and networking with single-digit millisecond latency. - Organizations can keep and process data within Turkish borders to support residency and compliance requirements. - The zone supports latency-sensitive workloads in sectors such as finance, government, telecommunications, and healthcare. - Applications can combine Istanbul infrastructure with the broader AWS Region, enabling hybrid architectures without operating a private data center. ## Security and AI Service Updates - **Security Hub Extended** now integrates with 21 curated partner solutions across nine security categories, including endpoint protection, threat intelligence, and cloud security posture management. - **Amazon SageMaker AI** supports OpenAI-compatible inference APIs, allowing existing OpenAI-based applications to use SageMaker with minimal or no SDK changes. - **Secrets Manager Agent** can pre-fetch secrets at startup, reducing cold-start delays, and can assume IAM roles for workloads with different permission boundaries. - **Amazon Bedrock** introduced tools for advanced prompt optimization and migration across foundation models. ## Open-Source and Local Development Tools - AWS open-sourced **ExtendDB**, a DynamoDB-compatible adapter for alternative storage backends. - It supports local development and testing without a live AWS connection. - It can help teams retain DynamoDB API semantics while controlling the underlying storage layer. - **AWS SAM CLI** now supports CloudFormation Language Extensions locally, improving consistency between local testing and production deployments. ## Developer Experience and Reliability - **Kiro Web** brings AWS’s AI-assisted, spec-driven development environment to browsers, providing access to chat and agent capabilities without installing the desktop IDE. - AWS updated default retry behavior across SDKs and CLI tools. - Improvements include smarter backoff and better throttling handling. - Production applications should become more resilient to transient failures without additional configuration. ## Container Image Changes - Bitnami images are being removed from Amazon ECR Public. - Teams currently using those images should review the migration timeline and update image references to Bitnami’s own registry to avoid interruptions. ## Upcoming AWS Events - AWS Summit Amsterdam: May 27 - AWS Summit Bangkok: May 28 - AWS Summit Milan: May 28 Builders should evaluate the Istanbul Local Zone for residency- or latency-sensitive systems, consider ExtendDB and SAM improvements for local workflows, and review the Bitnami registry change before images are removed from ECR Public.

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AWSAIAmazon BedrockServerless+4

aws·May 6, 2026·3 min readCurated summary

The AWS MCP Server is now generally available | Amazon Web Services

The AWS MCP Server is now generally available as a managed way for AI agents to access AWS securely through IAM-authenticated tools. It combines live AWS documentation, access to more than 15,000 API operations, and sandboxed scripting so agents can produce more current, efficient, and production-ready results. The post concludes that this solves major limitations of model-only AWS assistance without granting agents unrestricted credentials. ## Why AI Agents Struggle with AWS - Models may lack knowledge of recently launched services such as Amazon S3 Vectors, Aurora DSQL, and Bedrock AgentCore. - Agents often default to the AWS CLI instead of AWS CDK or CloudFormation. - Generated IAM policies are frequently broader than necessary. - The resulting infrastructure may work in demos but fail production standards. ## Core AWS MCP Server Tools - `call_aws` can execute more than 15,000 AWS API operations using the user’s existing IAM credentials. - `search_documentation` and `read_documentation` retrieve current AWS documentation and best practices at query time. - The compact tool set reduces model context usage and is intended to support newly launched APIs within days. ## General Availability Improvements - IAM context keys allow fine-grained access control through standard IAM policies without requiring a separate server permission. - Documentation retrieval no longer requires authentication. - Reduced token consumption improves complex, multi-step workflows. - The `run_script` tool executes short Python scripts in a server-side sandbox. - The sandbox inherits IAM permissions. - It has no network access or access to the user’s local filesystem and shell. - It can combine multiple API calls, filter results, and calculate outputs in one round trip. ## Skills and AWS Best Practices - Skills replace Agent SOPs with curated guidance for common AWS tasks. - AWS service teams contribute and maintain the Skills. - They help agents avoid mistakes, use validated patterns, reduce hallucinations, and consume fewer tokens. - Keeping the tool list small makes agent behavior more predictable. ## Enterprise Security and Observability - IAM policies and Service Control Policies can separate human permissions from agent permissions. - For example, a user may perform write operations while the MCP server is restricted to read-only access. - CloudWatch metrics under the `AWS-MCP` namespace distinguish agent activity from direct human calls. - AWS CloudTrail records all API calls for auditing and compliance. ## Demonstration with Claude Code - Without the MCP Server, Claude Opus 4.6 suggested several valid ways to store embeddings on S3 but missed Amazon S3 Vectors because the service launched after its training cutoff. - With the MCP Server, Claude Code searched current AWS documentation and correctly identified S3 Vectors. - Claude Code can connect through the open-source `mcp-proxy-for-aws`, which bridges local IAM credentials and MCP’s OAuth 2.1 requirement. - The server works with Claude Code, Kiro, Cursor, Codex, and other MCP-compatible clients. ## Availability and Cost - The service is available in US East (N. Virginia) and Europe (Frankfurt). - It can make API calls across AWS Regions. - There is no additional charge for the MCP Server; users pay for AWS resources and applicable data transfer. The AWS MCP Server is a practical foundation for giving agents current AWS knowledge and controlled operational access. Teams should pair it with narrowly scoped IAM policies, read-only defaults where possible, and CloudWatch or CloudTrail monitoring.

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AWSModel Context ProtocolPythonClaude Code+4