Hey! It’s my first post for 2026, and I’m writing to you while watching our driveway getting dug out. I hope wherever you are you are safe and warm and your data is still flowing!

This week brings exciting news for customers running GPU-intensive workloads, with the launch of our newest graphics and AI inference instances powered by NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell architecture. Along with several service enhancements and regional expansions, this week’s updates continue to expand the capabilities available to AWS customers.

Last week’s launches

I thought these projects, blog posts, and news items were also interesting:

• Amazon EC2 G7e instances are now generally available — The new G7e instances accelerated by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs deliver up to 2.3 times better inference performance compared to G6e instances. With two times the GPU memory and support for up to 8 GPUs providing 768 GB of total GPU memory, these instances enable running medium-sized models of up to 70B parameters with FP8 precision on a single GPU. G7e instances are ideal for generative AI inference, spatial computing, and scientific computing workloads. Available now in US East (N. Virginia) and US East (Ohio).
• Amazon Corretto January 2026 Quarterly Updates — AWS released quarterly security and critical updates for Amazon Corretto Long-Term Supported (LTS) versions of OpenJDK. Corretto 25.0.2, 21.0.10, 17.0.18, 11.0.30, and 8u482 are now available, ensuring Java developers have access to the latest security patches and performance improvements.
• Amazon ECR now supports cross-repository layer sharing — Amazon Elastic Container Registry now enables you to share common image layers across repositories through blob mounting. This feature helps you achieve faster image pushes by reusing existing layers and reduce storage costs by storing common layers once and referencing them across repositories.
• Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights expands to four additional regions — CloudWatch Database Insights on-demand analysis is now available in Asia Pacific (New Zealand), Asia Pacific (Taipei), Asia Pacific (Thailand), and Mexico (Central). This feature uses machine learning to help identify performance bottlenecks and provides specific remediation advice.
• Amazon Connect adds conditional logic and real-time updates to Step-by-Step Guides — Amazon Connect Step-by-Step Guides now enables managers to build dynamic guided experiences that adapt based on user interactions. Managers can configure conditional user interfaces with dropdown menus that show or hide fields, change default values, or adjust required fields based on prior inputs. The feature also supports automatic data refresh from Connect resources, ensuring agents always work with current information.

Upcoming AWS events

Keep a look out and be sure to sign up for these upcoming events:

• Best of AWS re:Invent (January 28-29, Virtual) — Join us for this free virtual event bringing you the most impactful announcements and top sessions from AWS re:Invent. AWS VP and Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr will share highlights during the opening session. Sessions run January 28 at 9:00 AM PT for AMER, and January 29 at 9:00 AM SGT for APJ and 9:00 AM CET for EMEA. Register to access curated technical learning, strategic insights from AWS leaders, and live Q&A with AWS experts.
• AWS Community Day Ahmedabad (February 28, 2026, Ahmedabad, India) — The 11th edition of this community-driven AWS conference brings together cloud professionals, developers, architects, and students for expert-led technical sessions, real-world use cases, tech expo booths with live demos, and networking opportunities. This free event includes breakfast, lunch, and exclusive swag.

Join the AWS Builder Center to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community. Browse for upcoming in-person and virtual developer-focused events in your area.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

~ micah

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon EC2 G7e instances, Amazon Corretto updates, and more (January 26, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Can you believe it? We’re nearly at the end of 2025. And what a year it’s been! From re:Invent recap events, to AWS Summits, AWS Innovate, AWS re:Inforce, Community Days, and DevDays and, recently, adding that cherry on the cake, re:Invent 2025, we have lived through a year filled with exciting moments and technology advancements which continue to shape our new modern world.

Speaking of re:Invent, if you haven’t caught up yet on all the new releases and announcements (and there were plenty of exciting launches across every area), be sure to check out our curated post highlighting the top announcements from AWS re:Invent 2025. We’ve organized all the key releases into easy-to-navigate categories and included links so you can dive deeper into anything that sparks your interest.

While the year may be wrapping up, our teams are still busy working on things that you have either asked for as customers or that we pro-actively create to make your lives easier. Last week had quite a few interesting releases as usual, so let’s look at a few that I think could be useful for many of you out there.

Last week’s launches

Amazon WorkSpaces Secure Browser introduces Web Content Filtering – Organizations can now control web access through category-based filtering across 25+ predefined categories, granular URL policies, and integrated compliance logging. The feature works alongside existing Chrome policies and integrates with Session Logger for enhanced monitoring and is available at no additional cost in 10 AWS Regions with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Amazon Aurora DSQL now supports cluster creation in seconds – Developers can now instantly provision Aurora DSQL databases with setup time reduced from minutes to seconds, enabling rapid prototyping through the integrated AWS console query editor or AI-powered development via the Aurora DSQL Model Context Protocol server. Available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions where Aurora DSQL is offered, with AWS Free Tier access available.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now supports integration with Kiro powers – Developers can now accelerate Aurora PostgreSQL application development using AI-assisted coding through Kiro powers, a repository of pre-packaged Model Context Protocol servers. The Aurora PostgreSQL integration provides direct database connectivity for queries, schema management, and cluster operations, dynamically loading relevant context as developers work. Available for one-click installation in Kiro IDE across all AWS Regions.

Amazon ECS now supports custom container stop signals on AWS Fargate – Fargate tasks now honor the stop signal configured in container images, enabling graceful shutdowns for containers that rely on signals like SIGQUIT or SIGINT instead of the default SIGTERM. The ECS container agent reads the STOPSIGNAL instruction from OCI-compliant images and sends the appropriate signal during task termination. Available at no additional cost across all AWS Regions.

Amazon CloudWatch SDK supports optimized JSON, CBOR protocols – CloudWatch SDK now defaults to JSON and CBOR protocols, delivering lower latency, reduced payload sizes, and decreased client-side CPU and memory usage compared to the traditional AWS Query protocol. Available at no additional cost across all AWS Regions and SDK language variants.

Amazon Cognito identity pools now support private connectivity with AWS PrivateLink – Organizations can now securely exchange federated identities for temporary AWS credentials through private VPC connections, eliminating the need to route authentication traffic over the public internet. Available in all AWS Regions where Cognito identity pools are supported, except AWS China (Beijing) and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

AWS Application Migration Service supports IPv6 – Organizations can now migrate applications using IPv6 addressing through dual-stack service endpoints that support both IPv4 and IPv6 communications. During replication, testing, and cutover phases, you can use IPv4, IPv6, or dual-stack configurations to launch servers in your target environment. Available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions that support MGN and EC2 dual-stack endpoints.

And that’s it for the AWS News Blog Weekly Roundup…not just for this week, but for 2025! We’ll be taking a break and returning in January to continue bringing you the latest AWS releases and updates.

As we close out 2025, it’s remarkable to look back at just how much has changed since the beginning of year. From groundbreaking AI capabilities to transformative infrastructure innovations, AWS has delivered an incredible year of releases that have reshaped what’s possible in the cloud. Throughout it all, the AWS News Blog has been right here with you every week with our Weekly Roundup series, helping you stay informed and ready to take advantage of each new opportunity as it arrived. We’re grateful you’ve joined us on this journey, and we can’t wait to continue bringing you the latest AWS innovations when we return in January 2026.

Until then, happy building, and here’s to an even more exciting year ahead!

Matheus Guimaraes | @codingmatheus

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon ECS, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Cognito and more (December 15, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, we’re announcing support for Amazon EKS in AWS Backup to provide the capability to secure Kubernetes applications using the same centralized platform you trust for your other Amazon Web Services (AWS) services. This integration eliminates the complexity of protecting containerized applications while providing enterprise-grade backup capabilities for both cluster configurations and application data. AWS Backup is a fully managed service to centralize and automate data protection across AWS and on-premises workloads. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service to manage availability and scalability of the Kubernetes clusters. With this new capability, you can centrally manage and automate data protection across your Amazon EKS environments alongside other AWS services.

Until now, for backups, customers relied on custom solutions or third-party tools to back up their EKS clusters, requiring complex scripting and maintenance for each cluster. The support for Amazon EKS in AWS Backup eliminates this overhead by providing a single, centralized, and policy-driven solution that protects both EKS clusters (Kubernetes deployments and resources) and stateful data (stored in Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) only) without the need to manage custom scripts across clusters. For restores, customers were previously required to restore their EKS backups to a target EKS cluster which was either the source EKS cluster, or a new EKS cluster, requiring that an EKS cluster infrastructure is provisioned ahead of time prior to the restore. With this new capability, during a restore of EKS cluster backups, customers also have the option to create a new EKS cluster based on previous EKS cluster configuration settings and restore to this new EKS cluster, with AWS Backup managing the provisioning of the EKS cluster on the customer’s behalf.

This support includes policy-based automation for protecting single or multiple EKS clusters. This single data protection policy provides a consistent experience across all services AWS Backup supports. It allows creation of immutable backups to prevent malicious or inadvertent changes, helping customers meet their regulatory compliance needs. In case there is a customer data loss or cluster downtime event, customers can easily recover their EKS cluster data from encrypted, immutable backups using an easy-to-use interface and maintain business continuity of running their EKS clusters at scale.

How it works
Here’s how I set up support for on-demand backup of my EKS cluster in AWS Backup. First, I’ll show a walkthrough of the backup process, then demonstrate a restore of the EKS cluster.

Backup
In the AWS Backup console, in the left navigation pane, I choose Settings and then Configure resources to opt in to enable protection of EKS clusters in AWS Backup.

Now that I’ve enabled Amazon EKS, in Protected resources I choose Create on-demand backup to create a backup for my already existing EKS cluster floral-electro-unicorn.

Enabling EKS in Settings ensures that it shows up as a Resource type when I create on-demand backup for the EKS cluster. I proceed to select the EKS resource type and the cluster.

I leave the rest of the information as default, then select Choose an IAM role to select a role (test-eks-backup) that I’ve created and customized with the necessary permissions for AWS Backup to assume when creating and managing backups on my behalf. I choose Create on-demand backup to finalize the process.

The job is initiated, and it will start running to back up both the EKS cluster state and the persistent volumes. If Amazon S3 buckets are attached to the backup, you’ll need to add the additional Amazon S3 backup permissions AWSBackupServiceRolePolicyForS3Backup to your role. This policy contains the permissions necessary for AWS Backup to back up any Amazon S3 bucket, including access to all objects in a bucket and any associated AWS KMS key.

The job is completed successfully and now EKS clusterfloral-electro-unicorn is backed up by AWS Backup.

Restore
Using the AWS Backup Console, I choose the EKS backup composite recovery point to start the process of restoring the EKS cluster backups, then choose Restore.

I choose Restore full EKS cluster to restore the full EKS backup. To restore to an existing cluster, I Choose an existing cluster then select the cluster from the drop-down list. I choose the Default order as the order in which individual Kubernetes resources will be restored.

I then configure the restore for the persistent storage resources, that will be restored alongside my EKS clusters.

Next, I Choose an IAM role to execute the restore action. The Protected resource tags checkbox is selected by default and I’ll leave it as is, then choose Next.

I review all the information before I finalize the process by choosing Restore, to start the job.

Selecting the drop-down arrow gives details of the restore status for both the EKS cluster state and persistent volumes attached. In this walkthrough, all the individual recovery points are restored successfully. If portions of the backup fail, it’s possible to restore the successfully backed up persistent stores (for example, Amazon EBS volumes) and cluster configuration settings individually. However, it’s not possible to restore full EKS backup. The successfully backed up resources will be available for restore, listed as nested recovery points under the EKS cluster recovery point. If there’s a partial failure, there will be a notification of the portion(s) that failed.

Benefits
Here are some of the benefits provided by the support for Amazon EKS in AWS Backup:

• A fully managed multi-cluster backup experience, removing the overhead associated with managing custom scripts and third-party solutions.
• Centralized, policy-based backup management that simplifies backup lifecycle management and makes it seamless to back up and recover your application data across AWS services, including EKS.
• The ability to store and organize your backups with backup vaults. You assign policies to the backup vaults to grant access to users to create backup plans and on-demand backups but limit their ability to delete recovery points after they’re created.

Good to know
The following are some helpful facts to know:

• Use either the AWS Backup Console, API, or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to protect EKS clusters using AWS Backup. Alternatively, you can create an on-demand backup of the cluster after it has been created.
• You can create secondary copies of your EKS backups across different accounts and AWS Regions to minimize risk of accidental deletion.
• Restoration of EKS backups is available using the AWS Backup Console, API, or AWS CLI.
• Restoring to an existing cluster will not override the Kubernetes versions, or any data as restores are non-destructive. Instead, there will be a restore of the delta between the backup and source resource.
• Namespaces can only be restored to an existing cluster to ensure a successful restore as Kubernetes resources may be scoped at the cluster level.

Voice of the customer

Srikanth Rajan, Sr. Director of Engineering at Salesforce said “Losing a Kubernetes control plane because of software bugs or unintended cluster deletion can be catastrophic without a solid backup and restore plan. That’s why it’s exciting to see AWS rolling out the new EKS Backup and Restore feature, it’s a big step forward in closing a critical resiliency gap for Kubernetes platforms.”

Now available
Support for Amazon EKS in AWS Backup is available today in all AWS commercial Regions (except China) and in the AWS GovCloud (US) where AWS Backup and Amazon EKS are available. Check the full Region list for future updates.

To learn more, check out the AWS Backup product page and the AWS Backup pricing page.

Try out this capability for protecting your EKS clusters in AWS Backup and let us know what you think by sending feedback to AWS re:Post for AWS Backup or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

– Veliswa.

The post Secure EKS clusters with the new support for Amazon EKS in AWS Backup appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

This week started with challenges for many using services in the the North Virginia (us-east-1) Region. On Monday, we experienced a service disruption affecting DynamoDB and several other services due to a DNS configuration problem. The issue has been fully resolved, and you can read the full details in our official summary. As someone who works closely with developers, I know how disruptive these incidents can be to your applications and your users. The teams are learning valuable lessons from this event that will help improve our services going forward.

Last week’s launches

On a brighter note, I’m excited to share some launches and updates from this past week that I think you’ll find interesting.

AWS RTB Fabric is now generally available — If you’re working in advertising technology, you’ll be interested in AWS RTB Fabric, a fully managed service for real-time bidding workloads. It connects AdTech partners like SSPs, DSPs, and publishers through a private, high-performance network that delivers single-digit millisecond latency—critical for those split-second ad auctions. The service reduces networking costs by up to 80% compared to standard cloud solutions with no upfront commitments, and includes three built-in modules to optimize traffic, improve bid efficiency, and increase bid response rates. AWS RTB Fabric is available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore and Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt and Ireland).

Customer Carbon Footprint Tool now includes Scope 3 emissions data — Understanding the full environmental impact of your cloud usage just got more comprehensive. The AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool (CCFT) now covers all three industry-standard emission scopes as defined by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. This update adds Scope 3 emissions—covering the lifecycle carbon impact from manufacturing servers, powering AWS facilities, and transporting equipment to data centers—plus Scope 1 natural gas and refrigerants. With historical data available back to January 2022, you can track your progress over time and make informed decisions about your cloud strategy to meet sustainability goals. Access the data through the CCFT dashboard or AWS Billing and Cost Management Data Exports.

Additional updates

I thought these projects, blog posts, and news items were also interesting:

AWS Secret-West Region is now available — AWS launched its second Secret Region in the western United States, capable of handling mission-critical workloads at the Secret U.S. security classification level. This new region provides enhanced performance for latency-sensitive workloads and offers multi-region resiliency with geographic separation for Intelligence Community and Department of Defense missions. The infrastructure features data centers and network architecture designed, built, accredited, and operated for security compliance with Intelligence Community Directive requirements.

Amazon CloudWatch now generates incident reports — CloudWatch investigations can now automatically generate comprehensive incident reports that include executive summaries, timeline of events, impact assessments, and actionable recommendations. The feature collects and correlates telemetry data along with investigation actions to help teams identify patterns and implement preventive measures through structured post-incident analysis.

Amazon Connect introduces threaded email views — Amazon Connect email now displays exchanges in a threaded format and automatically includes prior conversation context when agents compose responses. These enhancements make it easier for both agents and customers to maintain context and continuity across interactions, delivering a more natural and familiar email experience.

Amazon EC2 I8g instances expand to additional regions — Storage Optimized I8g instances are now available in Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and third-generation AWS Nitro SSDs, these instances deliver up to 60% better compute performance and 65% better real-time storage performance per TB compared to previous generation I4g instances, with storage I/O latency reduced by up to 50%.

AWS Location Service adds enhanced map styling — Developers can now incorporate terrain visualization, contour lines, real-time traffic overlays, and transportation-specific routing details through the GetStyleDescriptor API. The new styling parameters enable tailored maps for specific applications—from outdoor navigation to logistics planning.

CloudWatch Synthetics introduces multi-check canaries — You can now bundle up to 10 different monitoring steps in a single canary using JSON configuration without custom scripts. The multi-check blueprints support HTTP endpoints with authentication, DNS validation, SSL certificate monitoring, and TCP port checks, making API monitoring more cost-effective.

Amazon S3 Tables now generates CloudTrail events — S3 Tables now logs AWS CloudTrail events for automatic maintenance operations, including compaction and snapshot expiration. This enables organizations to audit the maintenance activities that S3 Tables automatically performs to enhance query performance and reduce operational costs.

AWS Lambda increases asynchronous invocation payload size to 1 MB — Lambda has quadrupled the maximum payload size for asynchronous invocations from 256 KB to 1 MB across all AWS Commercial and GovCloud (US) Regions. This expansion streamlines architectures by allowing comprehensive data to be included in a single event, eliminating the need for complex data chunking or external storage solutions. Use cases now better supported include large language model prompts, detailed telemetry signals, complex ML output structures, and complete user profiles. The update applies to asynchronous invocations through the Lambda API or push-based events from services like S3, CloudWatch, SNS, EventBridge, and Step Functions. Pricing remains at 1 request charge for the first 256 KB, with 1 additional charge per 64 KB chunk thereafter.

Upcoming AWS events

Keep a look out and be sure to sign up for these upcoming events:

AWS re:Invent 2025 (December 1-5, 2025, Las Vegas) — AWS flagship annual conference offering collaborative innovation through peer-to-peer learning, expert-led discussions, and invaluable networking opportunities. Registration is now open.

Join the AWS Builder Center to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community. Browse for upcoming in-person and virtual developer-focused events in your area.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

~ micah

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS RTB Fabric, AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, AWS Secret-West Region, and more (October 27, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last week, my alma mater Standard Bank Group (SBG) hosted a Software Engineering Conference and invited me to be one of the keynote speakers. SBG has presence throughout Africa and this hybrid conference was attended by almost 2,000 engineers from across the continent. It was amazing to reconnect with long-time friends and former colleagues, and to make new friends.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week.

Passkey multi-factor authentication (MFA) for root and IAM users – We’ve added passkeys to the list of supported multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your root and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, to give you the convenience of use and easy recoverability. A passkey is a pair of cryptographic keys generated on your client device when you register for a service or a website. Passkeys can be used to replace passwords. However, for this initial release, we choose to use passkeys as a second factor authentication, in addition to your password.

Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection for Amazon S3 – At AWS re:Inforce 2024 this past week, we announced general availability of Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This is an expansion of GuardDuty Malware Protection to detect malicious file uploads to selected S3 buckets. Benefits include the ability to fully manage malware detection without managing compute infrastructure, and coverage summary for all protected buckets in your organization, to name a few. Read more in the post published last week detailing Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection for Amazon S3.

IAM Access Analyzer Update – More goodness out of AWS re:Inforce 2024 last week! We announced an IAM Access Analyzer Update, which allows you to extend custom policy checks and also includes a guided revocation. This gives you guidance that you can share with your developers so that they can revoke unneeded permissions. My colleague Jeff Barr writes about it in more detail in this post.

Other AWS news
AWS open source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open source newsletter in which he highlights new open source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community.

The .Net developer community remains close to our hearts here at AWS. I’m inspired by my colleagues Brandon Minnick and Francois Bouteruche who support this community, resulting in the AWS and the Azure engineering teams working together to create delightful .NET developer experiences. At the recently held NDC Oslo, which is part of the NDC Conferences hosted around the world, VP of Azure Developer Experience, Scott Hunter, talked about this collaboration during his keynote. Make sure to catch the keynote on the NDC Conferences YouTube Channel as soon as it’s published.

Upcoming AWS events
AWS Summits – These are free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Whether you’re in the Americas, Asia Pacific & Japan, or EMEA region, learn here about future AWS Summit events happening in your area.

AWS Community Days – Join an AWS Community Day event just like the one I mentioned at the beginning of this post to participate in technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from your area. If you’re in Sri Lanka, there’s an event happening in your area next week.

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events here.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

– Veliswa

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS.

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Passkey MFA, Malware Protection on Amazon S3, and more (June 17, 2024) | Amazon Web Services appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.