Amazon Prime Day 2026 was exclusively for Prime members and ran June 23–26, 2026 with millions of deals across more than 35 categories.

As part of our annual tradition of sharing how AWS powered Prime Day (2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025), I want to share the services and chart-topping metrics from AWS that made your amazing shopping experience possible.

Prime Day 2026 – all the numbers
As always, Prime Day was powered by AWS. Here are some of the most interesting and/or mind-blowing metrics:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and AWS Graviton – During Amazon Prime Day 2026, AWS Graviton powered up to 49% of the Amazon EC2 compute used by Amazon.com.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) – During Prime Day 2026, Amazon EBS, our high-performance block storage service, peaked at over 24.8 trillion I/O operations, moving over an exabyte of data daily.

AWS Lambda – AWS Lambda handled over 2.3 trillion invocations per day during Prime Day 2026.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Fargate – During Prime Day 2026, Amazon ECS launched an average of 158.3 million tasks per day on AWS Fargate, representing a 47.7 percent increase from the previous year’s Prime Day average.

Amazon CloudFront – Amazon CloudFront delivered over 2.1 trillion HTTP requests during the global week of Prime Day 2026, a 5 percent increase in total requests compared to Prime Day 2025.

Amazon DynamoDB – Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless, fully managed, distributed NoSQL database, powers multiple high-traffic Amazon properties and systems including Alexa, the Amazon.com sites, and all Amazon fulfillment centers. Over the course of Prime Day 2026, between June 23 and June 26, 2026, DynamoDB processed over 59 trillion requests. DynamoDB maintained high availability while delivering single-digit millisecond responses and peaking at 192 million requests per second.

Amazon Aurora – On Prime Day, Amazon Aurora, a relational database management system (RDBMS) built for high performance and availability at global scale for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and DSQL, processed hundreds of billions of transactions, stored 5,491 terabytes of data, and transferred 1,194 terabytes of data.

Amazon ElastiCache – During Prime Day, Amazon ElastiCache peaked at serving over 2.3 quadrillion daily requests and 2.1 trillion requests in a minute.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams – Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, a fully managed serverless data streaming service, processed a peak of 988 million records per second during Prime Day 2026.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) – Amazon SNS, a fully managed pub/sub messaging service for application-to-application and application-to-person communication, delivered 5 trillion messages in a single day during Prime Day 2026.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) – Amazon SQS, a fully managed message queuing service for microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications, received a peak of 213 million messages per second during Prime Day 2026

AWS CloudTrail – AWS CloudTrail processes billions of API activity events per day for governance, compliance, and operational auditing. During Prime Day 2026, that volume surged to 3.6 trillion events in just four days, a 44% increase over Prime Day 2025.

AWS CloudWatch – Amazon CloudWatch processed over 2.15 quadrillion metric observations per day during Prime Day 2026.

Amazon GuardDuty – During Prime Day 2026, Amazon GuardDuty monitored an average of 14.08 trillion log events per hour, a 59% increase from last year’s Prime Day.

AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) – We ran over 44,000 AWS FIS experiments – more than six times what we conducted in 2025 – to help ensure Amazon.com remains highly available on Prime Day.

Prepare to scale
If you’re preparing for similar business-critical events, product launches, and migrations, I recommend that you take advantage of AWS Countdown Premium. From retail peak seasons to major sporting events, elections, and healthcare enrollment periods, we help you deliver flawless experiences when it matters most. Our experts help you manage your infrastructure to handle massive traffic spikes while maintaining security and performance. We work alongside your team to scale infrastructure, optimize costs during demand surges, strengthen security measures, and monitor real-time demands. To learn more, visit AWS Countdown Premium for business critical events.

I look forward to seeing what other records will be broken next year!

— Channy

The post All the numbers: Amazon Prime Day 2026 powered by AWS appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last week, we announced a public preview of Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI, built on a customized version of OpenAI’s Agents API engineered to be AWS-native and integrated with AWS resources. You can now build agents optimized for OpenAI models that run entirely inside AWS with the identities, permissions, and governance controls you already use.

You can choose an execution environment: self-hosted compute to use an existing development machine, container, or compute environment or Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime, for managed runtime sessions and configurable storage in your AWS account. To learn more, visit the Amazon Bedrock documentation.

In addition, we are adding new frontier models on Amazon Bedrock to expand your model choices:

• OpenAI GPT-6.1 Sol: An upgrade to GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6.1 Sol delivers exceptionally strong performance on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work. According to OpenAI, it approaches GPT-6 Astra across demanding evaluations at roughly one-fifth of the cost, giving developers more room to build and run capable agents at scale. To learn more, visit the GPT-6.1 Sol model card.
• OpenAI GPT-6 Astra UltraFast mode: Ultrafast is a premium speed tier for GPT-6 Astra, built for workloads where speed matters most. According to OpenAI, Ultrafast delivers up to 6x faster inference in the API, with up to 300 tokens per second. The Amazon Bedrock inference engine delivers the performance, security, and reliability required for production workloads. To learn more, visit the GPT-6 Astra model card.
• Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5.5: Claude Sonnet 5.5 is a smarter, more efficient Sonnet and a step up from Sonnet 5, making it a natural upgrade for teams already building on Sonnet. It’s stronger for coding, completing well-scoped tasks as part of a larger coding strategy such as building and fixing features with Claude in the same session or verifying output against requirements. To learn more, visit the Claude Sonnet 5.5 model card.
• SpaceXAI Grok 4.7: Grok 4.7 builds on Grok 4.6 with better mixed-document handling, more dependable repo-scale coding with planning and error recovery, and enhanced browser-use agents for form fills and portal navigation. To learn more, visit the Grok 4.7 model card.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:

• AWS Well-Architected Agent (preview): You can use an AI-powered agent service that analyzes your AWS environment to deliver targeted, contextual recommendations for improving your applications’ cost, security, performance, and resilience. The agent analyzes your infrastructure, understands your unique business goals, and delivers contextual recommendations.
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL supports direct querying of Apache Iceberg and Parquet data: You can directly query operational data together with data stored in data lakes in Apache Iceberg and Parquet formats using your existing PostgreSQL applications and tools, without extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines or data duplication.
• Amazon S3 Tables support all Apache Iceberg V3 data types: Amazon S3 Tables add support for geometry, geography, unknown, and nanosecond timestamp data types, along with column default values, as defined in the Iceberg V3 specification. You can now store geospatial coordinates and nanosecond-precision event times natively instead of encoding them in strings or integers.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

AWS service availability updates
When the availability of an AWS service or feature changes, we provide customers guidance in AWS Product Lifecycle Changes on available alternatives and support for migration so that disruptions to your operations are minimized. The following lifecycle changes were updated on September 29, 2026.

Services moving to Maintenance (no longer accessible to new customers starting October 29, 2026):

Services entering Sunset:

Services reaching End of Support (as of September 29, 2026):

• Amazon Mechanical Turk

We understand that changes in availability can impact your operations. For specific guidance, consult the relevant service documentation or contact AWS Support.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional projects and news items you may find interesting:

• Introducing Kiro workflows: Kiro workflows enable you to carry out complex tasks from start to finish with multiple agents and less supervision. We’ve been building Kiro itself with workflows, including the new cloud configuration, cloud sessions, and most of the workflow experience.
• Introducing Strands Decider: Strands Decider is one of a new class of decision models or system one models, a type of model that has been gaining significant attention since TypeSafe AI’s launch of Jev earlier this month. Strands Decider 2B is a small, open source, decision model optimized for fast experimentation, local development, and innovation.
• New FDE pathways for AWS Partners: On June 30, AWS announced the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization, backed by a $1 billion investment, and extended this hands-on delivery approach to AWS Partners through the Partner-Led FDE motion. Now, AWS Partners have a structured way to build and validate that depth with three new Partner FDE pathways and credentials that recognize the applied proficiency required to deliver production agentic AI.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Learn more about AWS, browse and join upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, startup events, and developer-focused events, including upcoming AWS re:Invent and AWS Community Days. Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development.

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

— Channy

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI, Q3 service availability updates, Kiro workflows, and more (October 5, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, we’re announcing a new capability for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL that you can use to directly query operational data together with data stored in your data lake in Apache Iceberg and Apache Parquet formats, using your existing PostgreSQL applications and tools. By eliminating the need to extract, transform, and load (ETL) structured data from data lakes into your operational database, you can reduce operational complexity and simplify application development. You can also use Aurora PostgreSQL to query data from data lakes managed in Iceberg REST Catalog (IRC)-compatible catalogs, giving you access to data across a breadth of analytics systems without moving or duplicating it. Whether you’re powering real-time dashboards, enriching transactions with historical context, or building AI agents that reason over both live and archived data, you can now do it all through a single, familiar interface.

Previously, if your application needed to combine recent transactional data in Aurora with historical records stored in Amazon S3, a common approach was to build reverse ETL pipelines that duplicated data, increased infrastructure costs, and required ongoing engineering effort to keep everything synchronized. This challenge only grows as you increasingly embed AI agents into your applications, where it is impractical to predict and pre-replicate every dataset an agent might need.

DuckLabs, the team that maintains the DuckDB project, recently joined Amazon, and this capability is an example of how the efficiency of DuckDB is being integrated into our services. DuckDB is now embedded directly within Aurora PostgreSQL, so you can query live operational data (including uncommitted writes) alongside your data lake in a single query. Query processing stays within Aurora, with no additional network hops and no ETL pipelines that duplicate data. You can query Apache Iceberg tables managed through the AWS Glue Data Catalog, as well as Parquet and Iceberg data stored in Amazon S3 and S3 Tables. You do all of this using familiar PostgreSQL syntax and your existing applications and tools.

We’re excited to bring the speed and simplicity of DuckDB directly into Aurora PostgreSQL, so you and your agents can query and combine operational and Iceberg data using the familiar PostgreSQL applications, tools, and endpoints already in use. By building this capability around DuckDB, future improvements to the open source engine can continue to bring performance and functionality gains to Aurora and other AWS services.

What is new
This capability is supported on two Aurora PostgreSQL major versions: 17 (starting with 17.11) and 18 (starting with 18.6). To use it, you create an Aurora PostgreSQL cluster, attach an IAM role with the AuroraAnalytics feature, and enable the aurora_analytics extension. The IAM role is what gives Aurora access to your data in Amazon S3 and the AWS Glue Data Catalog. You then create foreign tables that point to your Iceberg or Parquet data in the data lake, and query them using familiar PostgreSQL syntax. You can complete this setup through the Amazon RDS console, or with any PostgreSQL client such as psql. The process is well documented in the Aurora PostgreSQL documentation.

You can query data across external IRC-compatible catalogs through AWS Glue Data Catalog federation. You register the external catalog once with Glue, and then create foreign tables for the tables you want to query, the same way you would for any Glue-native table. A single query can then join data stored in Aurora with Iceberg tables registered across multiple catalogs, so applications get a unified view without moving data or replacing your existing catalog investments.

Aurora also applies optimizations such as predicate pushdown and column pruning so that only the relevant data is read. This keeps queries efficient even as the underlying data grows. Frequently accessed data is also cached in your Aurora instance, so subsequent queries against the same data return faster. You can inspect this behavior per query using aurora_analytics_stat_statements(), which reports metrics such as rows scanned, bytes read from Amazon S3, and cache hits.

To see how direct querying works, I connected to my Aurora PostgreSQL database using psql and created the extension:

CREATE EXTENSION aurora_analytics;

For my walkthrough, I set up a simple financial scenario. I have a recent_transactions table in Aurora with the last 7 days of customer transactions, and a Parquet file in Amazon S3 containing 5 years of historical transaction data. To make Aurora aware of the historical data, I created a foreign table pointing at the Parquet file in S3:

CREATE FOREIGN TABLE transaction_history ()
SERVER aurora_analytics_server
OPTIONS (
    location 's3://<my-bucket>/finance/transaction_history.parquet',
    format 'parquet'
);

Notice the empty parentheses in the CREATE FOREIGN TABLE statement. Aurora automatically reads the schema from the Parquet file metadata, so you do not need to define columns manually. For workloads with many tables, you can skip creating them one at a time: a single IMPORT FOREIGN SCHEMA statement bulk-creates foreign tables for every Iceberg or Parquet table in an AWS Glue Data Catalog database, inferring schemas automatically.

With both tables in place, I ran a single query that combines the recent operational data in Aurora with the historical data in S3:

SELECT merchant, category, amount, transaction_date, 'recent' AS source
FROM recent_transactions
WHERE customer_id = 'C-1001'
UNION ALL
SELECT merchant, category, amount, transaction_date, 'historical' AS source
FROM transaction_history
WHERE customer_id = 'C-1001'
  AND transaction_date >= CURRENT_DATE - INTERVAL '5 years'
ORDER BY transaction_date DESC
LIMIT 15;

The result shows both recent and historical transactions in a single result set. The 7 most recent rows come from Aurora, and the rest come directly from the Parquet file in S3. DuckDB handles the analytical scan of the Parquet data under the hood, while Aurora handles the operational data. That single query would have previously required a pipeline to move the historical data into the database first.

If a query pattern needs single-digit-millisecond latency, you can materialize data from the data lake into a native Aurora PostgreSQL table using familiar commands such as CREATE TABLE AS SELECT, INSERT INTO ... SELECT, or MERGE INTO. The materialized table lives in Aurora and is queried like any other PostgreSQL table, giving you a low-latency path for hot data without operating a separate ingestion pipeline. The read queries can run on any Aurora PostgreSQL instance in your cluster, whether the writer or a read replica, so you can offload analytical scans from your operational workload. The materialization commands write data into Aurora, so they run on the writer instance.

Get started today
Direct querying of Apache Iceberg and Parquet data from Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL is available today in all commercial AWS Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, at no additional charge. You pay only for the incremental Aurora compute the queries consume and Amazon S3 request costs for reading data lake files.

To learn more, visit the Amazon Aurora features page, read the Aurora PostgreSQL documentation, or try it in the Amazon RDS console. We welcome your feedback through AWS re:Post or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Esra

The post Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now supports direct querying of Apache Iceberg and Parquet data in your data lake appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

AWS Builder Center turned one year old last week. Launched on July 9, 2025, the platform has grown from a community hub with Wishlist voting, community profiles, and a toolbox into a full ecosystem with sandbox environments, workshops, Spaces, and a Builders’ Library. To mark the anniversary, Rick Suttles published a full feature timeline covering everything shipped over the past year: AWS Capabilities by Region (1,500+ services across 37 Regions), Spaces for community-created groups, workshops with category and complexity filters, badges and streaks, article series, view counts, saved items, student status, availability notifications, sign-in with GitHub and Amazon, and sandbox environments.

Jeff Barr published a retrospective summarizing Builder Center’s first year. Since launch, 5,548 authors have published 6,448 articles with more than 10.4 million page views combined. Builders have earned 99,226 badges since the badge system launched in March 2026. Community members have submitted 565 wishes, 10 of which have shipped with another 20 on the near-term roadmap.

The top community article Building an AWS Study Buddy with MCP + Strands Agents SDK by Dineshraj Dhanapathy reached 50,000+ views. Chris Miller’s Migrating an EOL Linux Server to AWS in 8 Hours with Kiro followed at 45,000+, and Yash Aggarwal’s AIdeas: NeuroVoice – Multimodal AI for Early Screening of Neurological Diseases article reached 38,000+.

The week’s headline addition is Sandbox Environments by Rick Suttles. Sandboxes give you a free, pre-provisioned AWS account to complete a workshop exercise. Each environment is active for 8 hours, after which the account and all its resources are automatically de-provisioned. You can have one active sandbox at a time and request one per week. No personal AWS account, credit card, or manual cleanup required.

Last week’s launches

Here’s what else happened this week.

• AWS Security Hub introduces Network Scanning – Security Hub introduced Network Scanning, a capability that identifies resources in your environment that are reachable from the public internet. Network Scanning probes your resources from the internet to detect actual reachability, complementing the existing network reachability findings in Security Hub that identify configurations that could make a resource reachable. It discovers public IP addresses, virtual machines, and load balancers across your AWS and Azure environments, identifies reachable ports, and determines what services are running behind them. Each reachable port generates a Security Hub finding with evidence of the port and service discovered. Security Hub Exposures then automatically correlates these findings with other findings and resource configurations to determine broader risk. Existing customers can enable Network Scanning in individual accounts and Regions, or across an organization through a configuration policy. For new customers, Network Scanning is on by default. It is included with Security Hub Essentials at no additional cost.
• Security Hub also extends unified security management to Microsoft Azure – Security Hub now monitors Microsoft Azure resources, providing unified posture management, vulnerability management, and security response across both clouds. It automatically discovers Azure VMs, container images, Function Apps, and identities, and evaluates them for misconfigurations, internet exposure, and software vulnerabilities. AWS and Azure findings appear in the same prioritized view with the same formats and automation workflows.
• Amazon SageMaker Studio integrates with Hugging Face for one-click model deployment and customization – You can now go from discovering a model on Hugging Face to working with it in SageMaker Studio in a single click. Select any supported model on Hugging Face and choose “Customize on SageMaker AI” or “Deploy on SageMaker AI” to land directly on the corresponding workflow page with the model pre-loaded. New customers receive a Studio environment created in seconds with pre-configured permissions for serverless model customization (including fine-tuning with custom reward functions for reinforcement learning), model evaluation, and deployment to SageMaker or Bedrock endpoints. Verified customers receive default GPU access to G5, G6, and G4dn instances without requesting quota increases, and quota utilization is visible directly inside the Studio environment.
• Amazon EKS Auto Mode and Amazon ECS Managed Instances reduce GPU management fees by up to 60% – Beginning July 1, 2026, EKS Auto Mode and ECS Managed Instances reduce management fees for accelerated instance types: G-series fees are down 35%, and P-series and AWS Trainium fees are down 60%. The reductions apply automatically to existing clusters and require no action from customers. Both services include capabilities built for accelerated workloads. EKS Auto Mode provides automatic parallel image pulling on GPU instances with local NVMe storage and accelerator-aware node repair. ECS Managed Instances provides GPU metrics through Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights and automatic health monitoring for GPU hardware failures.
• Amazon Aurora DSQL change data capture (CDC) is now generally available – Aurora DSQL CDC streams the results of insert, update, and delete operations as change events to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. You can use it to synchronize data across microservices, trigger Lambda functions, or deliver changes to S3, Redshift, and OpenSearch Service through Amazon Data Firehose. CDC streaming is designed to have zero impact on database workload performance and requires no infrastructure to manage.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news

Here are some additional posts you may find useful:

• Building secure AI agents at scale: Introducing Loom for AWS – Loom is an open-source enterprise platform for building agents with AWS Strands Agents and deploying them on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime. It provides a unified management UI and backend API with identity provider integration, scope-based authorization, multi-persona navigation, and full lifecycle management for agents, memory, MCP servers, and agent-to-agent integrations. Loom enforces automated resource tagging for cost attribution, implements RBAC and ABAC for multi-tenant security, uses paved-path blueprints for agent deployments, manages identity propagation through delegated actor chains, integrates with AWS Agent Registry for discovery and governance, and supports human-in-the-loop review before sensitive actions. The project is available in AWS Labs on GitHub.
• Introducing Claude apps gateway for AWS – The Claude apps gateway is a self-hosted control plane that gives organizations centralized control over access, cost, and policy for Claude Code and Claude Desktop. It connects to any OIDC-compliant identity provider, enforces managed settings on every request, routes inference to Amazon Bedrock or Claude Platform on AWS, and supports per-user and per-group spend caps. The gateway runs as a stateless container in your private network, backed by a PostgreSQL database for short-lived sign-in state. No long-lived secrets are stored on developer machines. Deploy it through Amazon Bedrock to keep data within the AWS security boundary, or through Claude Platform on AWS for the native Claude platform experience.
• Introducing OAuth support for AWS MCP Server – You can now connect agents to the AWS MCP Server using browser-based OAuth with the same credentials you use for the AWS Console or CLI. The new sign-in path supports IAM federation, AWS IAM Identity Center, and root or IAM users. AWS Sign-In issues short-lived access tokens and refresh tokens, with automatic token management so developers stay authenticated across restarts. For headless use cases, a non-interactive flow lets applications with existing AWS credentials obtain OAuth access tokens through the create-oauth2-token-with-iam API. New governance controls include OAuth-specific IAM condition keys, token introspection and revocation, dynamic client registration, and CloudTrail audit elements.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS Summits – Free in-person events for builders and innovators to learn, think big, and make new connections. Coming up: Taipei (July 15), Bogotá (July 30), Jakarta (August 6), Ciudad de México (August 12), Johannesburg (August 19), and Zurich (September 2).
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences planned and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include Yaoundé, Cameroon (July 25), Ahmedabad, India (July 25), Belo Horizonte, Brazil (August 22), Ottawa, Canada (August 22), Tulsa, USA (August 22), and Toronto, Canada (August 29).

Visit the AWS Builder Center to meet other builders, contribute solutions, and find resources that help you keep building.

Wishing everyone a restful and enjoyable summer. Whether you’re building, learning, or recharging, I hope you find time for all three. I’ll be heading to Scandinavia for a few weeks to trade the heat for some cooler weather and longer evenings. Come back next week for more news!

— Esra

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Builder Center at 1 year, Network Scanning in Security Hub, Loom for AWS, and more (July 13, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

In my last Week in Review post, I shared what I’d been hearing from customers in the AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AI-DLC) workshops I’ve been delivering. Last week I was back at it, this time in Denver for a two-day AI-DLC workshop, where I helped facilitate 17 teams to deliver nearly 20 separate use cases in just two days. The pace of acceleration that AI-DLC unlocks—especially when paired with tools like Claude Code on Amazon Bedrock—is fundamentally changing how businesses operate. Traditional roles within software development teams are collapsing into smaller, AI-augmented squads, and the paradigm shift is beginning to take place right in front of us. To learn more about how to utilize various AI tools, visit the GitHub repository of AI-DLC workflow.

This shift is also reshaping how AWS account teams (solutions architects, customer solutions managers, and technical account managers) collaborate with customers. It’s becoming less about handing off advisory design documents and more about building alongside them in real time. It’s a genuinely exciting moment to be in the middle of the change, and this week’s headline launch — Anthropic’s most capable model yet, now on AWS — is going to push that pace even further.

Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news…

Headlines

Claude Opus 4.8 on AWS — Anthropic’s most capable generally available model is now accessible through both Amazon Bedrock and the Claude Platform on AWS. Opus 4.8 is built for agentic coding, knowledge work, and extended autonomous task execution — it sustains longer autonomous sessions with deeper reasoning, recovers from errors, and synthesizes information across lengthy documents. For coding workloads, it reads codebases like an engineer, plans before it edits, and holds context across long sessions. On Amazon Bedrock, you get AWS-managed features like Guardrails, Knowledge Bases, and data residency; on the Claude Platform on AWS, you get Anthropic’s native APIs unified with AWS billing. To learn more, visit the deep-dive blog post.

Last week’s launches

Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

• Introducing the next generation of AWS Resilience Hub — A reimagined Resilience Hub gives SREs and developers a unified framework to define resilience standards, evaluate applications against them, and demonstrate compliance across an entire portfolio. It introduces modular resilience policies (covering service-level objectives (SLOs), multi-AZ/Region DR, and data recovery), business-oriented application modeling, generative AI-powered assessments aligned with the Well-Architected and Resilience Analysis Frameworks, and automatic dependency discovery via DNS query log analysis. Integration with AWS Organizations enables organization-wide resilience management from a single delegated administrator account.
• Introducing the next generation of Amazon OpenSearch Serverless for building agentic AI applications — Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now a fully managed search and vector engine purpose-built for agentic AI applications. It scales from zero to thousands of requests per second—roughly 20x faster than the prior generation—delivers up to 60% cost savings versus peak-provisioned clusters, and adds GPU acceleration plus new SEARCH and VECTORSEARCH collection types. Native integrations with Vercel, Kiro, Claude Code, and Cursor through OpenSearch Agent Skills make it straightforward to plug into your agent stack.
• New assessment capabilities in AWS Transform — AWS Transform expands with new tools to help you build migration business cases and evaluate TCO before moving workloads to AWS. You can ingest data from RVTools exports, CMDB data, the AWS Transform discovery tool, and third-party discovery tools, then run what-if scenarios across region, utilization, and service mapping for EC2, FSx, S3, SQL Server on EC2, and virtual desktops. The release also adds Agentic Readiness Analysis (ARA) and Modernization Analysis (MODA), which scan code repositories in 5 to 30 minutes per repo to surface severity-tagged findings with file-level evidence and AWS-mapped remediation guidance.
• Amazon Aurora MySQL with Kiro Powers — Aurora MySQL now integrates with Kiro Powers, drawing from a curated repository of pre-packaged MCP servers, steering files, and hooks validated by Kiro partners. Developers can execute both data plane tasks (queries, schema management) and control plane tasks (cluster management) in natural language, with dynamic guidance for Aurora MySQL Serverless scaling, RDS-to-Aurora migration, and replication setup. The companion Database Blog post explains how the agent produces the API calls, SQL, and configuration for you to review and run — available via one-click install from the Kiro IDE or webpage.
• Amazon WorkSpaces Applications now supports Windows Desktop OS — You can now bring your own Windows Desktop licenses to Amazon WorkSpaces Applications and stream full Windows desktops and applications from AWS-hosted dedicated hardware. BYOL eliminates OS fees (you pay only for compute and streaming infrastructure), supports eligible Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, and gives users a matching experience between local and remote environments — same workflows, shortcuts, and navigation in both.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news

Here are some additional posts and resources that you might find interesting:

• Meet our newest AWS Heroes — May 2026 — An AWS Builder Center post introducing the latest cohort of AWS Heroes recognized for their contributions to the global AWS community.
• AI-native, full-stack web apps with Vercel and AWS databases — Database blog post on the new Vercel and AWS Databases integration, which lets you provision Aurora PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, or Aurora DSQL directly from the Vercel dashboard or via v0. The post also highlights the H0 hackathon with $160,000 in prizes for building full-stack apps on this stack.
• Introducing US-based, US citizen 24/7 technical support for AWS GovCloud (US) customers: Your mission never sleeps. Neither do we. — Public Sector blog post announcing that all AWS GovCloud (US) technical support cases are now automatically routed to US-based, US citizen engineers around the clock — no opt-in required — for government agencies, contractors, nonprofits, and academic institutions running mission-critical workloads.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Learn more about AWS, browse and join upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, startup events, and developer-focused events as well as AWS Summits and AWS Community Days. Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development.

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

-Micah

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Opus 4.8 on AWS, Aurora MySQL with Kiro Powers, and more (June 1, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

My most exciting news of last week: Amazon Bedrock AgentCore previewed the first managed payment capabilities enabling AI agents to autonomously access and pay for APIs, MCP servers, web content, and other agents. Built in partnership with Coinbase and Stripe, it removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building customized systems for billing, credential management, and compliance.

You can connect a Coinbase CDP wallet or Stripe Privy wallet as a payment connection, set session-level spending limits, and your agent transacts autonomously during execution. What excites me most is what AgentCore payments can unlock—like a research agent that can pay for real-time market data on the fly, or a coding agent calling paid APIs mid-task.

To learn more, visit the blog post, dive deeper using the documentation, and get started with the AgentCore CLI.

Last week’s launches

Here are last week’s launches that caught my attention:

• Agent Toolkit for AWS – A production-ready suite of tools and guidance, available at no additional charge, that helps AI coding agents build on AWS with fewer errors, lower token costs, and enterprise-grade security controls. The Agent Toolkit for AWS is the successor to the MCP servers, plugins, and skills available on AWS Labs. To get started, visit the quick start guide or browse the available skills and plugins on GitHub.
• AWS MCP Server GA – You can use a managed remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives AI agents and coding assistants secure, authenticated access to all AWS services through a small, fixed set of tools. It is part of the Agent Toolkit for AWS. To learn more, visit Seb Stormacq’s blog post.
• Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents (Preview) – You can use AI agents to securely access and operate desktop applications through managed WorkSpaces environments. This capability allows organizations to automate everyday workflows at scale while maintaining full enterprise-grade governance and compliance. To learn more, visit Micah Walter’s blog post.
• Amazon EC2 M8idn/M8idb and R8idn/R8idb instances – These instances are powered by custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors available only on AWS and the latest sixth-generation AWS Nitro cards. These instances deliver up to 43% better compute performance per vCPU compared to previous-generation instances. M8idn/R8idn instances offer up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth, and M8idb/R8idb instances deliver up to 300 Gbps EBS bandwidth.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Additional updates

Here are some additional news items that you might find interesting:

• Valkey turns two – Valkey stands as proof that open, community-driven technology innovates faster, scales further, and delivers more value than any single-vendor model. Valkey has surpassed 100 million Docker pulls (up 17x year over year) and attracted more than 225 contributors who have submitted over 1,500 pull requests, roughly double the development pace of Redis over the same period. You can also use the latest Valkey 9.0 in Amazon ElastiCache.
• Query billion-scale vectors with SQL – You can learn how to query Amazon S3 Vectors from Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition using standard SQL, and how to combine vector similarity results with relational filters in a single query, for example, finding the most semantically similar products and then filtering by price, stock status, or tenant in one SQL statement.
• Building an end-to-end agentic SRE using AWS DevOps Agent – Learn how to configure DevOps Agent Spaces that define an investigation scope, integrating seamlessly with Amazon CloudWatch, Splunk, GitHub, and Slack. You can also learn how to trigger automated investigations via webhooks, generate mitigation plans, and hand off agent-ready specs to coding agents like Kiro for implementation.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Learn more about AWS, browse and join upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, startup events, and developer-focused events as well as AWS Summits and AWS Community Days. Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development.

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

— Channy

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Bedrock AgentCore payments, Agent Toolkit for AWS, and more (May 11, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

I have been building with AI agents and MCP tools for a while now, and one question kept coming up: how do you give an agent real, authenticated access to AWS without handing it the keys to the kingdom? Today, there is an answer.

I’m happy to announce the general availability of the AWS MCP Server, a managed remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives AI agents and coding assistants secure, authenticated access to all AWS services through a small, fixed set of tools.

The AWS MCP Server is part of the Agent Toolkit for AWS, a suite of tooling that includes the MCP Server, skills, and plugins that help coding agents build more effectively and efficiently on AWS.

AI coding agents are already useful for many tasks, but they run into real trouble when working with AWS at any meaningful depth. Without access to current AWS documentation, agents rely on training data that may be months out of date and may not know about services like Amazon S3 Vectors, Amazon Aurora DSQL, or Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. When asked to build infrastructure, they tend to reach for the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) rather than AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) or AWS CloudFormation, and they produce AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies that are far broader than necessary. The result is infrastructure that works in a demo but is not production-ready.

The AWS MCP Server addresses this through a compact set of tools that do not consume your model’s context window. The call_aws tool executes any of the 15,000+ AWS API operations using your existing IAM credentials. When we will launch new APIs, they will be supported within days. The search_documentation and read_documentation tools retrieve current AWS documentation and best practices at query time, so the agent always works from up-to-date information.

With general availability, we are introducing several new capabilities. The AWS MCP Server now supports IAM context keys, so you no longer need a separate IAM permission to use the server and can express fine-grained access in a standard IAM policy. Documentation retrieval no longer requires authentication. We have also reduced the number of tokens required per interaction, which matters for complex, multi-step workflows.

Also new, the run_script tool lets the agent write a short Python script that runs server-side in a sandboxed environment. The sandbox inherits your IAM permissions but has no network access, so you can give an agent the ability to process data without giving it access to your local file system or a shell. When an agent needs to call multiple APIs and combine the results, making them one at a time is slow and burns context. With run_script, the agent chains API calls, filters responses, and computes results in a single round-trip, which is both faster and more context-efficient.

The most significant addition is the transition from Agent SOPs to Skills. Skills provide curated guidance and best practices for the tasks where agents most commonly make mistakes. This helps agents complete work faster, using validated best practices, with fewer errors and fewer tokens — all of which saves you time and money. Skills are contributed and maintained by AWS service teams. This keeps the tool list short and predictable, which reduces hallucination and keeps the agent focused.

For enterprise customers, the AWS MCP Server provides a clear separation between human and agent permissions. You can use IAM policies or Service Control Policies to specify that a given user can perform mutating operations while the MCP server is restricted to read-only actions. Amazon CloudWatch metrics published under the AWS-MCP namespace let you observe MCP server calls separately from direct human calls, giving you the audit trail that compliance teams require. Amazon CloudTrail captures all API calls for a complete record.

Let’s see it in action

For this demo, I chose to use Claude Code, but I can use the AWS MCP Server with any AI agent that supports MCP, which is basically all tools available today: Kiro CLI, Kiro, Cursor, Codex, and more. I configure Claude Code to use the Anthropic Opus 4.6 model.

Opus 4.6 has a knowledge cutoff date in May 2025. It means it doesn’t know anything that happened after May last year. I ask a question about an AWS service that was introduced recently: Amazon S3 Vectors, launched in preview in July 2025 and that went GA in December 2025.

The question is “how to store embedding on S3″. (embedding is a kind of vector)

It gives me five solutions, all correct, but none using S3 Vectors as I asked. Note that this answer comes from the Opus 4.6 model, not from Claude Code. Any AI tool using the same model will return similar answers because S3 Vectors wasn’t announced at the time the model was trained.

Let’s now try with the AWS MCP Server.

The AWS MCP Server uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and IAM SigV4 authentication. To use my local AWS credentials configuration over MCP, which only supports OAuth 2.1, I configure my AI coding agent to call the AWS MCP Server through a proxy. The MCP Proxy for AWS is an open source proxy that runs on my machine and bridges the world of IAM authentication to OAuth.

I add the MCP configuration with this command:

claude mcp add-json aws-mcp --scope user 
   '{"command":"uvx","args":["mcp-proxy-for-aws@latest","https://aws-mcp.us-east-1.api.aws/mcp","--metadata","AWS_REGION=us-west-2"]}'

You’ll have to have uv installed before you can use the AWS MCP server. On Linux or Mac, you can run: curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Let’s analyze the JSON configuration:

• I use the user scope to make the server available to all my projects on my laptop.
• uvx mcp-proxy-for-aws is the command to launch the proxy; the rest of the arguments are parameters passed to the proxy.
• https://aws-mcp.us-east-1.api.aws/mcp is one of the two regional endpoints for the AWS MCP Server. The proxy will forward Claude Code’s requests to that endpoint.
• --metadata are passed to the proxy target. Here, it tells the AWS MCP Server to use the US West (Oregon) Region.

I start Claude Code and I type /mcp to verify the AWS MCP Server is correctly installed and can use my credentials.

I ask the same question: “how can I store embedding on S3”.

This time, Claude Code knows it has a tool it can use to answer the question. It asks me permission to invoke the aws___search_documentation tool. After a few seconds, I receive a correct answer: “AWS now has a dedicated service for this: Amazon S3 Vectors …”

Pricing and availability

The AWS MCP Server is available today in the US East (N. Virginia) and Europe (Frankfurt) AWS Regions and can make API calls to any Region. There is no additional charge for the AWS MCP server itself. You pay only for the AWS resources you create and any applicable data transfer costs.

The AWS MCP Server works with Claude Code, Kiro, Cursor, and any MCP-compatible client. To get started, see the AWS MCP Server User Guide.

I have been waiting for something like this since I started using MCP tools in my AI agents early last year. The combination of current documentation, authenticated API access, and sandboxed script execution in a single server changes what an agent can actually do on AWS. I am curious what you build with it. Let me know in the comments.

— seb

Updated on May 6th – Added uv installation script.

The post The AWS MCP Server is now generally available appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Late March took me to Seattle for the Specialist Tech Conference, one of the most energizing gatherings of AWS specialists from around the world. It was an incredible opportunity to connect with peers, exchange experiences, and go deep on the latest advancements in Generative AI and Amazon Bedrock — and a powerful reminder of something I truly believe in: when specialists come together to challenge each other, explore edge cases, and co-create solutions, the impact goes far beyond the meeting room. In a fast-moving space like AI, having a strong internal community isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a competitive advantage.

Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news…

Headlines

Anthropic partnership: Claude on AWS Trainium and Graviton, and Claude Cowork in Amazon Bedrock – This week, AWS and Anthropic deepened their product collaboration in meaningful ways for builders. Anthropic is now training its most advanced foundation models on AWS Trainium and Graviton infrastructure, co-engineering directly at the silicon level with Annapurna Labs to maximize computational efficiency from the hardware up through the full stack.

Claude Cowork is now available in Amazon Bedrock — Claude Cowork brings Anthropic’s collaborative AI capabilities directly to enterprise builders within the AWS ecosystem, enabling teams to work alongside Claude as a true collaborator, not just a tool. You can now deploy Claude Cowork within your existing Amazon Bedrock environment, keeping your data secure within AWS while leveraging the full power of Claude for team-based AI workflows.

Claude Platform on AWS (Coming soon) — A unified developer experience to build, deploy, and scale Claude-powered applications without leaving AWS. If you’re building with Generative AI on AWS, this is a significant step forward in what you’ll be able to do with Claude directly through Amazon Bedrock.

Meta signs agreement with AWS to power agentic AI on Amazon’s Graviton chips — Meta has signed an agreement to deploy AWS Graviton processors at scale, starting with tens of millions of Graviton cores to power CPU-intensive agentic AI workloads — including real-time reasoning, code generation, search, and multi-step task orchestration.

Last week’s launches

Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

• AWS Lambda functions can now mount Amazon S3 buckets as file systems with S3 Files — You can now mount Amazon S3 buckets as file systems in AWS Lambda using S3 Files, enabling your functions to perform standard file operations without downloading data for processing. Built on Amazon EFS, S3 Files provides the simplicity of a file system with the scalability, durability, and cost-effectiveness of S3 — and multiple Lambda functions can connect to the same file system simultaneously, sharing data through a common workspace. This is particularly valuable for AI and machine learning workloads where agents need to persist memory and share state across pipeline steps.
• Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes gateway for hybrid Kubernetes networking — Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service now offers the Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes gateway, which automates networking between your EKS cluster VPC and Kubernetes Pods running on EKS Hybrid Nodes. You can now eliminate the need to make on-premises pod networks routable or coordinate network infrastructure changes, greatly simplifying hybrid Kubernetes environments. The gateway automatically enables pod-to-pod traffic across cloud and on-premises environments, control plane-to-webhook communication, and connectivity for AWS services like Application Load Balancers, and is available at no additional charge.
• Amazon Aurora Serverless: Up to 30% better performance, smarter scaling, and still scales to zero — Amazon Aurora Serverless just got faster and smarter, with up to 30% better performance than the previous version and an enhanced scaling algorithm designed to handle workloads where multiple tasks compete for resources — like busy APIs and agentic AI applications with bursts of activity and long idle windows. You can now run even more demanding workloads serverlessly, paying only for what you use, and automatically scaling to zero when not in use. All improvements are available in platform version 4 at no additional cost.
• Amazon Bedrock AgentCore adds new features to help developers build agents faster — Amazon Bedrock AgentCore introduces a managed harness (preview), the AgentCore CLI, and AgentCore skills for coding assistants, helping developers go from idea to working agent prototype faster. The managed harness lets you define an agent by specifying a model, system prompt, and tools and run it immediately with no orchestration code required — and when you’re ready for full control, you can export the harness orchestration as Strands-based code. The AgentCore CLI deploys your agents with the governance and auditability of infrastructure-as-code (AWS CDK today, Terraform coming soon), and is available in 14 AWS Regions at no additional charge.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news

Here are some additional posts and resources that you might find interesting:

• Introducing granular cost attribution for Amazon Bedrock — This post walks through how Amazon Bedrock’s granular cost attribution works and covers practical example cost tracking scenarios. You can now tag and track Bedrock usage costs at a finer level of detail — useful for organizations running multiple teams or projects on Bedrock who need precise cost visibility and chargeback capabilities.
• Automating Incident Investigation with AWS DevOps Agent and Salesforce MCP Server — This post (co-written with Salesforce) shows how AWS DevOps Agent, integrated with the Salesforce MCP Server, automates the full lifecycle of infrastructure incident investigation — from identifying issues and diagnosing root causes to notifying customers through Salesforce Service Cloud. It’s a compelling real-world example of how AI agents and MCP-based tool connectivity are reshaping DevOps workflows in production, dramatically reducing mean time to resolution.
• Microcredentials from AWS are now free — Here’s why that matters — You can now access AWS microcredentials at no cost through AWS Skill Builder in all countries where the platform is offered. Unlike traditional multiple-choice certifications, microcredentials are hands-on assessments that place builders in simulated business scenarios where they configure, troubleshoot, and optimize directly in a live AWS environment — the same way they would on the job. A great opportunity to validate real cloud skills without a cost barrier.
• Amazon SageMaker AI now supports optimized generative AI inference recommendations — You can now use Amazon SageMaker AI to automatically identify optimized deployment configurations for your generative AI models, including instance type, container, and inference parameters. This new capability takes the guesswork out of tuning inference infrastructure, helping you reduce costs and improve latency for your AI applications in production.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• What’s Next with AWS — Tune in on April 28 for What’s Next with AWS, a virtual event featuring the latest announcements and product updates directly from AWS teams. A great opportunity to get up to speed on what’s new before diving into the week’s launches.
• AWS Summits — AWS Summits are free in-person events where you can explore the latest in cloud and AI innovation, learn best practices, and network with builders and experts. Coming up in May: Singapore (May 6), Tel Aviv (May 6), Warsaw (May 6), Stockholm (May 7), Sydney (May 13–14), Hamburg (May 20), Seoul (May 20), Amsterdam (May 27), Bangkok (May 28), Milan (May 28), and Mumbai (May 28). And in June, join us in Los Angeles (June 10). Check the full schedule and register at the link above.
• AWS Community Days — Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders, featuring technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs. Upcoming events include Athens, Greece (April 28), Vancouver, Canada (May 1), İstanbul, Türkiye (May 9), and Panama City, Panama (May 23). If you’re in Latin America, mark your calendar for the AWS Community Day Belo Horizonte (August 22) — registration is open at awscommunityday.com.br.

Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development. Browse here for upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

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

— Daniel Abib

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: Anthropic & Meta partnership, AWS Lambda S3 Files, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore CLI, and more (April 27, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last week, what excited me most was the launch of the 2026 AWS AI & ML Scholars program by Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of AWS Agentic AI, to provide free AI education to up to 100,000 learners worldwide. The program has two phases: a Challenge phase where you’ll learn foundational generative AI skills, followed by a fully funded three-month Udacity Nanodegree for the top 4,500 performers. Anyone 18 or older can apply, with no prior AI or ML experience required. Applications close on June 24, 2026. Visit the AWS AI & ML Scholars webpage to learn more and apply.

I’m also excited about the start of AWS Summit season, kicking off with AWS Summit Paris on April 1, followed by London on April 22. AWS Summits are free in-person events where builders and innovators can learn about Cloud and AI, think big, and make new connections. Explore the AWS Summits near you and join us in person.

Now, let’s dive into this week’s AWS news…

Last week’s launches

Here are last week’s launches that caught my attention:

• Announcing Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL serverless database creation in seconds — Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now offers express configuration, a streamlined setup with preconfigured defaults that supports creating and connecting to a database in seconds. With just two clicks, you can launch an Aurora PostgreSQL serverless database. You can modify certain settings during or after creation.
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now available with the AWS Free Tier — Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL is now available on the AWS Free Tier. If you’re new to AWS, you receive $100 in AWS credits upon sign-up and can earn an additional $100 in credits by using services like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).
• Announcing Agent Plugin for AWS Serverless — With the new Agent Plugin for AWS Serverless, you can easily build, deploy, troubleshoot, and manage serverless applications using AI coding assistants like Kiro, Claude Code, and Cursor. This plugin extends AI assistants with structured capabilities by packaging skills, sub-agents, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers into one modular unit. It automatically loads the guidance and expertise you need throughout development to build production-ready serverless applications on AWS.
• Amazon SageMaker Studio now supports Kiro and Cursor IDEs as remote IDEs — You can now remotely connect from Kiro and Cursor IDEs to Amazon SageMaker Studio. This lets you use your existing Kiro and Cursor setup, including spec-driven development, conversational coding, and automated feature generation, while accessing the scalable compute resources of Amazon SageMaker Studio.
• Introducing visual customization capability in AWS Management Console — You can now customize your AWS Management Console with visual settings like account color and control which regions and services you see. Hiding unused regions and services helps you focus better and work faster by reducing cognitive load and unnecessary scrolling.
• Announcing Aurora DSQL connector to simplify building Ruby applications — You can now use the Aurora DSQL Connector for Ruby (pg gem) to easily build Ruby applications on Aurora DSQL. The Ruby Connector simplifies authentication and improves security by automatically generating tokens for each connection, eliminating the risks of traditional passwords while maintaining full compatibility with existing pg gem features.
• AWS Lambda increases the file descriptor limit for functions running on Lambda Managed Instances — AWS Lambda increases the file descriptor limit from 1,024 to 4,096, a 4x increase, for functions running on Lambda Managed Instances (LMI). You can now run I/O intensive workloads such as high-concurrency web services and file-heavy data processing pipelines without running into file descriptor limits.
• AWS Lambda now supports up to 32 GB of memory and 16 vCPUs for Lambda Managed Instances — AWS Lambda functions on Lambda Managed Instances now support up to 32 GB of memory and 16 vCPUs. You can run compute-intensive workloads like data processing, media transcoding, and scientific simulations without managing infrastructure. Plus, you can adjust the memory-to-vCPU ratio (2:1, 4:1, or 8:1) to fit your workload.
• Announcing Bidirectional Streaming API for Amazon Polly — Traditional text-to-speech APIs use a request-response pattern. The new Bidirectional Streaming API for Amazon Polly is designed for conversational AI applications that generate text or audio incrementally, like large language model (LLM) responses. This lets you start synthesizing audio before the full text is available.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on our News Blog channel and the What’s New with AWS page.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS Summits — As I mentioned earlier, join AWS Summits in 2026 for free in-person events where you can explore emerging cloud and AI technologies, learn best practices, and network with industry peers and experts. Upcoming Summits include Paris (April 1), London (April 22), Bengaluru (April 23–24), Singapore (May 6), Tel Aviv (May 6), and Stockholm (May 7).
• AWS Community Days — Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders, featuring technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs. Upcoming events include San Francisco (April 10) and Romania (April 23–24).

Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development. Browse the AWS Events and Webinars for upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

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

— Prasad

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: AWS AI/ML Scholars program, Agent Plugin for AWS Serverless, and more (March 30, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

At re:Invent 2025, Colin Lazier, vice president of databases at AWS, emphasized the importance of building at the speed of an idea—enabling rapid progress from concept to running application. Customers can already create production-ready Amazon DynamoDB tables and Amazon Aurora DSQL databases in seconds. He previewed creating an Amazon Aurora serverless database with the same speed, and customers have since requested quick access and speed to this capability.

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of a new express configuration for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, a streamlined database creation experience with preconfigured defaults designed to help you get started in seconds.

With only two clicks, you can have an Aurora PostgreSQL serverless database ready to use in seconds. You have the flexibility to modify certain settings during and after database creation in the new configuration. For example, you can change the capacity range for the serverless instance at the time of create or add read replicas, modify parameter groups after the database is created. Aurora clusters with express configuration are created without an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) network and include an internet access gateway for secure connections from your favorite development tools – no VPN, or AWS Direct Connect required. Express configuration also sets up AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication for your administrator user by default, enabling passwordless database authentication from the beginning without additional configuration.

After it’s created, you have access to features available for Aurora PostgreSQL serverless, such as deploying additional read replicas for high availability and automated failover capabilities. This launch also introduces a new internet access gateway routing layer for Aurora. Your new serverless instance comes enabled by default with this feature, which allows your applications to connect securely from anywhere in the world through the internet using the PostgreSQL wire protocol from a wide range of developer tools. This gateway is distributed across multiple Availability Zones, offering the same level of high availability as your Aurora cluster.

Creating and connecting to Aurora in seconds means fundamentally rethinking how you get started. We launched multiple capabilities that work together to help you onboard and run your application with Aurora. Aurora is now available on AWS Free Tier, which you gain hands-on experience with Aurora at no upfront cost. After it’s created, you can directly query an Aurora database in AWS CloudShell or using programming languages and developer tools through a new internet accessible routing component for Aurora. With integrations such as v0 by Vercel, you can use natural language to start building your application with the features and benefits of Aurora.

Create an Aurora PostgreSQL serverless database in seconds

To get started, go to the Aurora and RDS console and in the navigation pane, choose Dashboard. Then, choose Create with a rocket icon.

Review pre-configured settings in the Create with express configuration dialog box. You can modify the DB cluster identifier or the capacity range as needed. Choose Create database.

You can also use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) or AWS SDKs with the parameter --with-express-configuration to create both a cluster and an instance within the cluster with a single API call which makes it ready for running queries in seconds.To learn more, visit Creating an Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster with express configuration.

Here is a CLI command to create the cluster:

$ aws rds create-db-cluster --db-cluster-identifier channy-express-db 
    --engine aurora-postgresql 
    –-with-express-configuration

Your Aurora PostgreSQL serverless database should be ready in seconds. A success banner confirms the creation, and the database status changes to Available.

After your database is ready, go to the Connectivity & security tab to access three connection options. When connecting through SDKs, APIs, or third-party tools including agents, choose Code snippets. You can choose various programming languages such as .NET, Golang, JDBC, Node.js, PHP, PSQL, Python, and TypeScript. You can paste the code from each step into your tool and run the commands.

For example, the following Python code is dynamically generated to reflect the authentication configuration:

import psycopg2
import boto3

auth_token = boto3.client('rds', region_name='ap-south-1').generate_db_auth_token(DBHostname='channy-express-db-instance-1.abcdef.ap-south-1.rds.amazonaws.com', Port=5432, DBUsername='postgres', Region='ap-south-1')

conn = None
try:
    conn = psycopg2.connect(
        host='channy-express-db-instance-1.abcdef.ap-south-1.rds.amazonaws.com',
        port=5432,
        database='postgres',
        user='postgres',
        password=auth_token,
        sslmode='require'
    )
    cur = conn.cursor()
    cur.execute('SELECT version();')
    print(cur.fetchone()[0])
    cur.close()
except Exception as e:
    print(f"Database error: {e}")
    raise
finally:
    if conn:
        conn.close()

Choose CloudShell for quick access to the AWS CLI which launches directly from the console. When you choose Launch CloudShell, you can see the command is pre-populated with relevant information to connect to your specific cluster. After connecting to the shell, you should see the psql login and the postgres => prompt to run SQL commands.

You can also choose Endpoints to use tools that only support username and password credentials, such as pgAdmin. When you choose Get token, you use an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication token generated by the utility in the password field. The token is generated for the master username that you set up at the time of creating the database. The token is valid for 15 minutes at a time. If the tool you’re using terminates the connection, you will need to generate the token again.

Building your application faster with Aurora databases

At re:Invent 2025, we announced enhancements to the AWS Free Tier program, offering up to $200 in AWS credits that can be used across AWS services. You’ll receive $100 in AWS credits upon sign-up and can earn an additional $100 in credits by using services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), AWS Lambda, and Amazon Bedrock. In addition, Amazon Aurora is now available across a broad set of eligible Free Tier database services.

Developers are embracing platforms such as Vercel, where natural language is all it takes to build production-ready applications. We announced integrations with Vercel Marketplace to create and connect to an AWS database directly from Vercel in seconds and v0 by Vercel, an AI-powered tool that transforms your ideas into production-ready, full-stack web applications in minutes. It includes Aurora PostgreSQL, Aurora DSQL, and DynamoDB databases. You can also connect your existing databases created through express configuration with Vercel. To learn more, visit AWS for Vercel.

Like Vercel, we’re bringing our databases seamlessly into their experiences and are integrating directly with widely adopted frameworks, AI assistant coding tools, environments, and developer tools, all to unlock your ability to build at the speed of an idea.

We introduced Aurora PostgreSQL integration with Kiro powers, which developers can use to build Aurora PostgreSQL backed applications faster with AI agent-assisted development through Kiro. You can use Kiro power for Aurora PostgreSQL within Kiro IDE and from the Kiro powers webpage for one-click installation. To learn more about this Kiro Power, read Introducing Amazon Aurora powers for Kiro and Amazon Aurora Postgres MCP Server.

Now available

You can create an Aurora PostgreSQL serverless database in seconds today in all AWS commercial Regions. For Regional availability and a future roadmap, visit the AWS Capabilities by Region.

You pay only for capacity consumed based on Aurora Capacity Units (ACUs) billed per second from zero capacity, which automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales capacity up or down based on your application’s needs. To learn more, visit the Amazon Aurora Pricing page.

Give it a try in the Aurora and RDS console and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Aurora PostgreSQL or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

The post Announcing Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL serverless database creation in seconds appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

AWS has reached its 20th anniversary! With a steady pace of innovation, AWS has grown to offer over 240 comprehensive cloud services and continues to launch thousands of new features annually for millions of customers. During this time, over 4,700 posts have been published on this blog—more than double the number since Jeff Barr wrote the 10th anniversary post.

AWS changed my life

Reflecting on what I was doing 20 years ago, I met Jeff in Seoul on March 13, 2006, when he came as the keynote speaker for the Korea NGWeb conference. At that time, Amazon was one of the first pioneers to initiate an API economy, introducing ecommerce API services. After the keynote speech, he returned home that evening, and I believe he wrote the Amazon S3 launch blog post on the flight back to the United States.

That short meeting with him brought significant changes to my life. He became my role model as a blogger, and I began building API-based services in my company and opening them to third-party developers. When I was a PhD student while taking a break from work, I realized that for individual researchers like me, AWS Cloud services are powerful tools for conducting large-scale research projects. After returning to work, my company became one of the first AWS customers in Korea in 2014. Countless developers—myself included—have embraced cloud computing and actively used its capabilities to accomplish what was previously impossible.

Over the past decade, the technology landscape has transformed dramatically. Deep learning emerged as a breakthrough in AI, evolving through generative AI based on large language models (LLMs) to today’s agentic AI technology. Jeff wrote, “When looking into the future, you need to be able to distinguish between flashy distractions and genuine trends, while remaining flexible enough to pivot if yesterday’s niche becomes today’s mainstream technology.” This principle guides how AWS approaches innovation—we start by listening to what customers truly need. The real trend isn’t pursuing every emerging technology, but rather reimagining solutions that address customers’ most critical challenges.

20 years of AWS

For the first 10 years, Jeff selected his favorite AWS launches and blog posts. Amazon S3, Amazon EC2 (2006), Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (2009), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift (2012), Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon Kinesis (2013), AWS Lambda (2014), and AWS IoT (2015).

While I also hate to play favorites, I want to choose some of my favorite AWS blog posts of the past decade.

• Deploying containers easily (2014) – Amazon Elastic Container Service makes it straightforward for you to run any number of containers across a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances using powerful APIs and other tools. In 2017, we launched Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service as a fully managed Kubernetes service and AWS Fargate as a serverless deployment option.
• High availability database at global scale (2017) – Amazon Aurora is a modern relational database service offering performance and high availability at scale. In 2018, we launched Amazon Aurora Serverless v1, and this serverless database evolved to Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 to scale down to zero. In 2025, we also launched Amazon Aurora DSQL is the fastest serverless distributed SQL database for always available applications.
• Machine learning (ML) at your fingertips (2017) – Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed end-to-end ML service that data scientists, developers, and ML experts can use to quickly build, train, and host machine learning models at scale. In 2024, we launched the next generation of Amazon SageMaker, a unified platform for data, analytics, and AI and introduced Amazon SageMaker AI to focus specifically on building, training, and deploying AI and ML models at scale.
• Best price performance for cloud workloads (2018) – We launched Amazon EC2 A1 instances powered by the first generation of Arm-based AWS Graviton Processors designed to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads. Last year, we previewed EC2 M9g instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors. Over 90,000 AWS customers have reaped the benefits of Graviton supporting popular AWS services such as Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS, AWS Lambda, Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon EMR, and Amazon OpenSearch Service.
• Run AWS Cloud in your data center (2019) – AWS Outposts is a family of fully managed services delivering AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location for a truly consistent hybrid experience. Now, AWS Outposts is available in a variety of form factors, from 1U and 2U Outposts servers to 42U Outposts racks, and multiple rack deployments. Customers such as DISH, Fanduel, Morningstar, Philips, and others use Outposts in workloads requiring low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, data residency, and application migration with local system interdependencies.
• Best price performance for ML workloads (2019) – We launched Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances powered by the first generation of AWS Inferentia chips designed to provide fast, low-latency inferencing. In 2022, we launched Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances powered by the first generation of AWS Trainium chips optimized for high performance AI training. Last year, we launched Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServers powered by Trainium3 to deliver the best token economics for next-generation generative AI applications. Customers such as Anthropic, Decart, poolside, Databricks, Ricoh, Karakuri, SplashMusic, and others are realizing performance and cost benefits of Trainium-based instances and UltraServers.
• Build your generative AI apps on AWS (2023) – Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers a choice of industry leading AI models along with a broad set of capabilities that you need to build generative AI applications, simplifying development with security, privacy, and responsible AI. Last year, we introduced Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, an agentic platform for building, deploying, and operating effective agents securely at scale. Now, more than 100,000 customers worldwide choose Amazon Bedrock to deliver personalized experiences, automate complex workflows, and uncover actionable insights.
• Your AI coding companion (2023) – We launched Amazon CodeWhisperer as the industry’s first cloud-based AI coding assistant service. The service delivered code generation from comments, open-source code reference tracking, and vulnerability scanning capabilities. In 2024, we rebranded the service to Amazon Q Developer and expanded its features to include a chat-based assistant in the console, project-based code generation, and code transformation tools. In 2025, this service evolved into Kiro, a new agentic AI development tool that brings structure to AI coding through spec-driven development, taking projects from prototype to production. Recently, Kiro previewed an autonomous agent, a frontier agent that works independently on development tasks, maintaining context and learning from every interaction.
• Broaden your AI model choices (2024) – We launched Amazon Titan models further increasing cost-effective AI model choice for text and multimodal needs in Amazon Bedrock. At AWS re:Invent 2024, we announced Amazon Nova models that delivers frontier intelligence and industry leading price performance. Now Amazon Nova has a portfolio of AI offerings—including Amazon Nova models, Amazon Nova Forge, a new service to build your own frontier models; and Amazon Nova Act, a new service to build agents that automate browser-based UI workflows powered by a custom Amazon Nova 2 Lite model.

Build with AI: Your path forward

A decade ago, AWS responded to the emergence of deep learning by launching the broadest and deepest ML services, such as Amazon SageMaker, democratizing AI for a wide range of customers—from individual developers and startups to large enterprises—regardless of their technical expertise.

AI technology has advanced significantly, but building and deploying AI models and applications still remains complex for many developers and organizations. AWS offers the broadest selection of AI models through Amazon Bedrock, including leading providers such as Anthropic and OpenAI. By using our model training and inference infrastructure and responsible AI both practical and scalable, you can accelerate trusted AI innovation while maintaining control of your data and costs—all built on our global infrastructure’s operational excellence.

Reinvent your idea, keep on learning, build confidently with AI you can trust, and share your successes with us! New AWS customers receive up to $200 in credits to try AWS AI for free. If you’re a student, start building with Kiro for free using 1,000 credits per month for one year.

— Channy

The post 20 years in the AWS Cloud – how time flies! appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last week, my team met many developers at Developer Week in San Jose. My colleague, Vinicius Senger delivered a great keynote about renascent software—a new way of building and evolving applications where humans and AI collaborate as co-developers using Kiro. Other colleagues spoke about building and deploying production-ready AI agents. Everyone stayed to ask and hear the questions related to agent memory, multi-agent patterns, meta-tooling and hooks. It was interesting how many developers were actually building agents.

We are continuing to meet developers and hear their feedback at third-party developer conferences. You can meet us at the dev/nexus, the largest and longest-running Java ecosystem conference on March 4-6 in Atlanta. My colleague, James Ward will speak about building AI Agents with Spring and MCP, and Vinicius Senger and Jonathan Vogel will speak about 10 tools and tips to upgrade your Java code with AI. I’ll keep sharing places for you to connect with us.

Last week’s launches

Here are some of the other announcements from last week:

• Claude Sonnet 4.6 model in Amazon Bedrock – You can now use Claude Sonnet 4.6 which offers frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work at scale. Claude Sonnet 4.6 approaches Opus 4.6 intelligence at a lower cost. It enables faster, high-quality task completion, making it ideal for high-volume coding and knowledge work use cases.
• Amazon EC2 Hpc8a instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors – You can use new Hpc8a instances delivering up to 40% higher performance, increased memory bandwidth, and 300 Gbps Elastic Fabric Adapter networking. You can accelerate compute-intensive simulations, engineering workloads, and tightly coupled HPC applications.
• Amazon SageMaker Inference for custom Amazon Nova models – You can now configure the instance types, auto-scaling policies, and concurrency settings for custom Nova model deployments with Amazon SageMaker Inference to best meet your needs.
• Nested virtualization on virtual Amazon EC2 instances – You can create nested virtual machines by running KVM or Hyper-V on virtual EC2 instances. You can leverage this capability for use cases such as running emulators for mobile applications, simulating in-vehicle hardware for automobiles, and running Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows workstations.
• Server-Side Encryption by default in Amazon Aurora – Amazon Aurora further strengthens your security posture by automatically applying server-side encryption by default to all new databases clusters using AWS-owned keys. This encryption is fully managed, transparent to users, and with no cost or performance impact.
• Kiro in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions – You can use Kiro for the development teams behind government missions. Developers in regulated environments can now leverage Kiro’s agentic AI tool with the rigorous security controls required.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Additional updates

Here are some additional news items that you might find interesting:

• Introducing Agent Plugins for AWS – You can see how new open-source Agent Plugins for AWS extend coding agents with skills for deploying applications to AWS. Using the deploy-on-aws plugin, you can generate architecture recommendations, cost estimates, and infrastructure-as-code directly from your coding agent.
• A chat with Byron Cook on automated reasoning and trust in AI systems – You can hear how to verify AI systems doing the right thing using automated reasoning when they generate code or manage critical decisions. Byron Cook’s team has spent a decade proving correctness in AWS and apply those techniques to agentic systems.
• Best practices for deploying AWS DevOps Agent in production – You can read best practices for setting up DevOps Agent Spaces that balance investigation capability with operational efficiency. According to Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS DevOps Agent, a frontier agent that resolves and proactively prevents incidents, has handled thousands of escalations, with an estimated root cause identification rate of over 86% within Amazon.

From AWS community

Here are my personal favorite posts from AWS community:

Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with community, share knowledge, and access content that supports your development.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS Summits – Join AWS Summits in 2026, free in-person events where you can explore emerging cloud and AI technologies, learn best practices, and network with industry peers and experts. Upcoming Summits include Paris (April 1), London (April 22), and Bengaluru (April 23–24).
• Amazon Nova AI Hackathon – Join developers worldwide to build innovative generative AI solutions using frontier foundation models and compete for $40,000 in prizes across five categories including agentic AI, multimodal understanding, UI automation, and voice experiences during this six-week challenge from February 2nd to March 16th, 2026.
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders, featuring technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs. Upcoming events include Ahmedabad (February 28), JAWS Days in Tokyo (March 7), Chennai (March 7), Slovakia (March 11), and Pune (March 21).

Browse here for upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events, startup events, and developer-focused events.

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

— Channy

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Sonnet 4.6 in Amazon Bedrock, Kiro in GovCloud Regions, new Agent Plugins, and more (February 23, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.