Some numbers are hard to picture until you sit with them for a moment. Last week we published the Prime Day 2026 metrics, and the one that stuck with me is 2.3 quadrillion: the daily requests Amazon ElastiCache peaked at during the event. Prime Day ran back in June, so this post always lands as a retrospective, and that gap is part of what makes it worth reading. By the time the numbers reach you, the only evidence that any of it happened is that nothing went wrong.

The rest of the week pulled in a different direction: smaller, cheaper, and more constrained. Claude Haiku 5.5 arrived on Amazon Bedrock at roughly 75 percent less than Haiku 4.5, Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic made voice agents quicker on their feet, and Strands Box showed up to put real boundaries around what an agent is allowed to do. Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news…

Headlines
All the numbers: Amazon Prime Day 2026 powered by AWS is the latest entry in a tradition that goes back to 2016, and the scale is still difficult to hold in your head. Over the four days of Prime Day, Amazon DynamoDB processed more than 59 trillion requests while peaking at 192 million requests per second, and kept single-digit millisecond responses throughout. AWS Lambda handled over 2.3 trillion invocations per day. Amazon EBS peaked above 24.8 trillion I/O operations, moving more than an exabyte of data daily. Amazon ECS launched an average of 158.3 million tasks per day on AWS Fargate, a 47.7 percent jump over last year, and AWS Graviton powered up to 49 percent of the Amazon EC2 compute that Amazon.com used.

The number I keep coming back to, though, isn’t a throughput record. The team ran more than 44,000 AWS Fault Injection Service experiments ahead of the event, more than six times what they ran in 2025. Those are deliberate failures injected on purpose, months in advance, so that the trillions of requests above turn into an ordinary shopping afternoon. If you’re preparing for your own peak moment, AWS Countdown Premium is built for exactly that kind of planning.

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

• Claude Haiku 5.5 is now available on AWS – You can now use the fastest model in the Claude 5.5 family on Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS, at around 75 percent less than Claude Haiku 4.5 for most tasks. It’s the first Haiku with effort controls, so you can tune cost against intelligence per task instead of fixing one setting for a whole workload. It pairs naturally with Claude Opus 5.5: Opus plans and makes the judgment calls, and because Haiku is fast and cheap, you can run many Haiku subagents in parallel for routing, classification, and small code changes across many files.

• Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic for voice agents – You can now build real-time voice agents on a speech-to-speech Amazon Nova model with better reasoning, instruction following, and tool-calling accuracy, plus lower latency. That combination matters for multi-step work: a support agent can look up an order, check return eligibility, and start the return inside one conversation. It keeps expressive voices in seven languages, controllable turn-taking, and a 256K context window, and pairs with Strands Bidi Agents, now generally available, to get a production voice agent going in a few lines of code.

• Amazon GuardDuty RDS Protection now detects data exfiltration and destruction – Amazon GuardDuty now looks past login anomalies to the queries themselves on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. RDS Protection for data activity builds behavioral baselines and uses ML-based anomaly detection plus threat intelligence to flag unusual data access, with no agents, extra infrastructure, or database configuration changes. This closes a real gap: once an attacker has valid credentials from phishing or a misconfiguration, their queries can look indistinguishable from your application’s.

• AWS Lambda supports OAuth for self-managed Apache Kafka event sources – You can now authenticate Lambda Kafka consumers through your enterprise identity provider, such as Amazon Cognito or Okta. Event source mappings previously supported only SASL/PLAIN, SASL/SCRAM, and mTLS, which left teams in regulated industries unable to use Kafka ESM at all. Now you get the automatic scaling, batching, error handling, and event filtering of Kafka ESM with the same identity governance you apply everywhere else. It works with self-hosted clusters and managed offerings including Confluent Cloud, Aiven, and Redpanda.

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 Strands Box: AI agent sandboxes powered by Dogwood – As more of us let agents run shell commands and call APIs without approving every step, isolation alone stops being enough. Strands Box is an open source sandbox (Apache 2.0, developer preview) that combines OS-level containment with fine-grained policies written in Dogwood, so permissions can depend on what the agent has already done. You can say “let the agent post to the incident channel, but no more than three times every 10 minutes” and have that enforced from outside the agent’s process. It also keeps real credentials out of the agent’s environment by attaching them at an egress gateway.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS re:Invent – re:Invent returns to Las Vegas from November 30 to December 4, and reserved seating is now open. The session catalog is live, so register and claim your spots in chalk talks, workshops, and builders’ sessions before they fill up.

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: Prime Day 2026 by the numbers, Claude Haiku 5.5, Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic, and more (October 13, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

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, AWS contributors joined the OpenSearch and Valkey communities at Open Source Summit Korea 2026 and MCP DevSummit Seoul 2026 to meet open source developers and contributors. At the four-day event, community leaders and users of these Linux Foundation open source projects gathered to share knowledge, collaborate on solutions, and push the projects forward.

Leaders of the Korean OpenSearch communities volunteered to participate in the booth, and also had time to network and interact in the user group meetup.

OpenSearch is an open source, enterprise-grade search and observability suite that brings order to unstructured data at scale. On June 9, 2026, OpenSearch 3.7 introduced new tools designed to query, alert, and track SLOs across logs, traces, and metrics through a single interface and retrieve vectors up to 5.5x faster for improved search performance. Since July 30, 2026, you can run OpenSearch version 3.7 on Amazon OpenSearch Service for improvements in vector search performance, search relevance, and Query Insights.

Valkey is an open source high-performance key/value datastore that supports a variety of workloads such as caching, message queues, and it can act as a primary database. On May 19, 2026, Valkey 9.1 introduced a redesigned I/O threading model that improves throughput by up to 17% and reduces memory usage for strings under 128 bytes by up to 20%. Since June 23, 2026, you can run Valkey 9.1 in Amazon ElastiCache for node-based clusters, delivering higher throughput, improved memory efficiency, and stronger access control for multi-tenant workloads.

You can connect with AWS contributors at upcoming OpenSearch and Valkey community events.

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

• Amazon EC2 application status checks: Amazon EC2 introduces a new status check that helps you detect and respond to application-level issues on your EC2 instances. With application status checks, EC2 monitors applications to detect issues such as a web server that has stopped accepting requests, a Docker daemon that is not running, an incorrect networking configuration, or a network interface that is no longer passing traffic. To learn more, visit the Application status checks documentation.
• AWS IAM role manager to set up IAM roles automatically: You can use a new role manager that automatically sets up the IAM roles your AWS services need. When you set up a supported service in the console, role manager creates a default role on your behalf, or reuses one that already exists in your account if it matches the required permissions. Role manager supports six AWS service consoles at launch. To learn more, read How AWS IAM role manager rethinks the starting point for IAM roles.
• OpenAI Daybreak available to eligible customers on Amazon Bedrock: Daybreak is the cyber defense initiative from OpenAI that gives defenders governed access to frontier AI for cybersecurity work. For most security teams, Daybreak Blue, powered by GPT-5.6 Sol, serves as the starting point across defensive workflows including vulnerability discovery, detection engineering, and incident response. Daybreak Red, powered by a new GPT-5.6 Cyber, is designed for advanced, authorized tasks such as vulnerability research, exploit reproduction, and mitigation development. To enroll, contact OpenAI or reach out to your AWS account team for guidance on eligibility. To learn more, read the AI Blog post.
• New foundation models in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart: We’re expanding the portfolio of foundation models available to AWS customers. These models address different enterprise AI challenges with specialized capabilities:

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 projects and news items you may find interesting:

• The deprecation of email validation in AWS Certificate Manager: ACM will discontinue support for email-validated public certificates by September 30, 2027. If you use email validation for your ACM public certificates, you need to migrate to DNS validation before that date. For Amazon CloudFront distributions, HTTP validation is also available.
• The next-generation AWS VPN Client with CLI support and admin controls: You can use a new AWS VPN Client built on OpenVPN3. With the new client, you get full backward compatibility with existing AWS Client VPN endpoints while delivering the automation capabilities and security posture that enterprise networking teams have been asking for.
• Oracle Exadata on Exascale for Oracle AI Database@AWS: ExaDB-XS brings Exadata-class performance and availability through a consumption-based model. With ExaDB-XS, you can scale compute and storage independently in small increments and pay only for what you consume.

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

— Channy

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: EC2 application status checks, IAM role manager, OpenAI Daybreak on Bedrock, and more (August 17, 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.

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.

Since Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced Savings Plans, customers have been able to lower the cost of running sustained workloads while maintaining the flexibility to manage usage across accounts, resource types, and AWS Regions. Today, we’re extending this flexible pricing model to AWS managed database services with the launch of Database Savings Plans, which help customers reduce database costs by up to 35% when they commit to a consistent amount of usage ($/hour) over a 1-year term. Savings automatically apply each hour to eligible usage across supported database services, and any additional usage beyond the commitment is billed at on-demand rates.

As organizations build and manage data-driven and AI applications, they often use different database services, engines and deployment types, including instance-based and serverless options, to meet evolving business needs. Database Savings Plans provide the flexibility to choose how workloads run while maintaining cost efficiency. If customers are in the middle of a migration or modernization effort, they can switch database engines and adjust deployment types, such as from provisioned to serverless as part of ongoing cost optimization, while continuing to receive discounted rates. If a customer’s business expands globally, they can also shift usage across AWS Regions and continue to benefit from the same commitment. By applying a consistent hourly commitment, customers can maintain predictable spend even as usage patterns evolve and analyze coverage and utilization using familiar cost management tools.

New Savings Plans

Each plan defines where pricing applies, the range of available discounts, and the level of flexibility provided across supported database engines, instance families, sizes, deployment options, or AWS Regions.

The hourly commitment automatically applies to all eligible usage regardless of Region, with support for Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility), Amazon Neptune, Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), Amazon Timestream, and AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS). As new eligible database offerings, instance types, or Regions become available, Savings Plans will automatically apply to that usage.

Discounts vary by deployment model and service type. Serverless deployments provide up to 35% savings compared to on-demand rates. Provisioned instances across supported database services deliver up to 20% savings. For Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Keyspaces, on-demand throughput workloads receive up to 18% savings, and provisioned capacity offers up to 12%. Together, these savings help customers optimize costs while maintaining consistent coverage for database usage. To learn more about the pricing and eligible usage, visit the Database Savings Plans pricing page.

Purchasing Database Savings Plans

AWS Billing and Cost Management Console helps you choose Savings Plans and guides you through the purchase process. You can get started from the AWS Management Console or use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) and the API. There are two ways to evaluate Database Savings Plans purchases, in the Recommendations view and in the Purchase Analyzer.

Recommendations – are automatically generated from your recent on-demand usage. To reach the Recommendations view in the Billing and Cost Management console, choose Savings and Commitments, Savings Plans, and Recommendations in the navigation pane. In the Recommendations view, select Database Savings Plans and configure the Recommendation options. AWS Savings Plans recommendations analyze your historical on-demand usage to identify the hourly commitment that delivers the highest overall savings.

The Purchase Analyzer – is designed for modeling custom commitment levels. If you want to purchase a different amount than the recommended commitment on the Purchase Analyzer page, select Database Savings Plans and configure Lookback period and Hourly commitment to simulate alternative commitment levels and see the projected impact on Cost, Coverage, and Utilization.

This way is preferred if your purchasing strategy includes smaller, incremental commitments over time or if you expect future usage changes that could affect your ideal purchase amount.

After reviewing the recommendations or running simulations in Savings Plans Recommendations or Savings Plans Purchase Analyzer, choose Add to cart to proceed with your chosen commitment. If you prefer to purchase directly, you can also navigate to the Purchase Savings Plans page. The console updates estimated discounts and coverage in real time as you adjust each setting, so you can evaluate the impact before completing your order.

You can learn more about how to choose and purchase Database Saving Plans by visiting the Savings Plans User Guide documents.

Now available

Database Savings Plans are available in all AWS Regions outside of China. Give them a try and start shaping your database strategy with more flexibility and predictable costs.

– Betty

The post Introducing Database Savings Plans for AWS Databases appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, we’re announcing virtual private cloud (VPC) encryption controls, a new capability of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) that helps you audit and enforce encryption in transit for all traffic within and across VPCs in a Region.

Organizations across financial services, healthcare, government, and retail face significant operational complexity in maintaining encryption compliance across their cloud infrastructure. Traditional approaches require piecing together multiple solutions and managing complex public key infrastructure (PKI), while manually tracking encryption across different network paths using spreadsheets—a process prone to human error that becomes increasingly challenging as infrastructure scales.

Although AWS Nitro based instances automatically encrypt traffic at the hardware layer without affecting performance, organizations need simple mechanisms to extend these capabilities across their entire VPC infrastructure. This is particularly important for demonstrating compliance with regulatory frameworks such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which require proof of end-to-end encryption across environments. Organizations need centralized visibility and control over their encryption status, without having to manage performance trade-offs or complex key management systems.

VPC encryption controls address these challenges by providing two operational modes: monitor and enforce. In monitor mode, you can audit the encryption status of your traffic flows and identify resources that allow plaintext traffic. The feature adds a new encryption-status field to VPC flow logs, giving you visibility into whether traffic is encrypted using Nitro hardware encryption, application-layer encryption (TLS), or both.

After you’ve identified resources that need modification, you can take steps to implement encryption. AWS services, such as Network Load Balancer, Application Load Balancer, and AWS Fargate tasks, will automatically and transparently migrate your underlying infrastructure to Nitro hardware without any action required from you and with no service interruption. For other resources, such as the previous generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, you will need to switch to modern Nitro based instance types or configure TLS encryption at application level.

You can switch to enforce mode after all resources have been migrated to encryption-compliant infrastructure. This migration to encryption-compliant hardware and communication protocols is a prerequisite for enabling enforce mode. You can configure specific exclusions for resources such as internet gateways or NAT gateways, that don’t support encryption (because the traffic flows outside of the AWS network).

Other resources must be encryption-compliant and can’t be excluded. After activation, enforce mode provides that all future resources are only created on compatible Nitro instances, and unencrypted traffic is dropped when incorrect protocols or ports are detected.

Let me show you how to get started

For this demo, I started three EC2 instances. I use one as a web server with Nginx installed on port 80, serving a clear text HTML page. The other two are continuously making HTTP GET requests to the server. This generates clear text traffic in my VPC. I use the m7g.medium instance type for the web server and one of the two clients. This instance type uses the underlying Nitro System hardware to automatically encrypt in-transit traffic between instances. I use a t4g.medium instance for the other web client. The network traffic of that instance is not encrypted at the hardware level.

To get started, I enable encryption controls in monitor mode. In the AWS Management Console, I select Your VPCs in the left navigation pane, then I switch to the VPC encryption controls tab. I choose Create encryption control and select the VPC I want to create the control for.

Each VPC can have only one VPC encryption control associated with it, creating a one-to-one relationship between the VPC ID and the VPC encryption control Id. When creating VPC encryption controls, you can add tags to help with resource organization and management. You can also activate VPC encryption control when you create a new VPC.

I enter a Name for this control. I select the VPC I want to control. For existing VPCs, I have to start in Monitor mode, and I can turn on Enforce mode when I’m sure there is no unencrypted traffic. For new VPCs, I can enforce encryption at the time of creation.

Optionally, I can define tags when creating encryption controls for an existing VPC. However, when enabling encryption controls during VPC creation, separate tags can’t be created for VPC encryption controls—because they automatically inherit the same tags as the VPC. When I’m ready, I choose Create encryption control.

Alternatively, I can use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI):

aws ec2 create-vpc-encryption-control --vpc-id vpc-123456789

Next, I audit the encryption status of my VPC using the console, command line, or flow logs:

aws ec2 create-flow-logs 
  --resource-type VPC 
  --resource-ids vpc-123456789 
  --traffic-type ALL 
  --log-destination-type s3 
  --log-destination arn:aws:s3:::vpc-flow-logs-012345678901/vpc-flow-logs/ 
  --log-format '${flow-direction} ${traffic-path} ${srcaddr} ${dstaddr} ${srcport} ${dstport} ${encryption-status}'
{
    "ClientToken": "F7xmLqTHgt9krTcFMBHrwHmAZHByyDXmA1J94PsxWiU=",
    "FlowLogIds": [
        "fl-0667848f2d19786ca"
    ],
    "Unsuccessful": []
}

After a few minutes, I see this traffic in my logs:

flow-direction traffic-path srcaddr dstaddr srcport dstport encryption-status
ingress - 10.0.133.8 10.0.128.55 43236 80 1 # <-- HTTP between web client and server. Encrypted at hardware-level
egress 1 10.0.128.55 10.0.133.8 80 43236 1
ingress - 10.0.133.8 10.0.128.55 36902 80 1
egress 1 10.0.128.55 10.0.133.8 80 36902 1
ingress - 10.0.130.104 10.0.128.55 55016 80 0 # <-- HTTP between web client and server. Not encrypted at hardware-level
egress 1 10.0.128.55 10.0.130.104 80 55016 0
ingress - 10.0.130.104 10.0.128.55 60276 80 0
egress 1 10.0.128.55 10.0.130.104 80 60276 0

• 10.0.128.55 is the web server with hardware-encrypted traffic, serving clear text traffic at application level.
• 10.0.133.8 is the web client with hardware-encrypted traffic.
• 10.0.130.104 is the web client with no encryption at the hardware level.

The encryption-status field tells me the status of the encryption for the traffic between the source and destination address:

• 0 means the traffic is in clear text
• 1 means the traffic is encrypted at the network layer (Level 3) by the Nitro system
• 2 means the traffic is encrypted at the application layer (Level7, TCP Port 443 and TLS/SSL)
• 3 means the traffic is encrypted both at the application layer (TLS) and the network layer (Nitro)
• “-” means VPC encryption controls are not enabled, or AWS Flow Logs don’t have the status information.

The traffic originating from the web client on the instance that isn’t Nitro based (10.0.130.104), is flagged as 0. The traffic initiated from the web client on the Nitro- ased instance (10.0.133.8) is flagged as 1.

I also use the console to identify resources that need modification. It reports two nonencrypted resources: the internet gateway and the elastic network interface (ENI) of the instance that isn’t based on Nitro.

I can also check for nonencrypted resources using the CLI:

aws ec2 get-vpc-resources-blocking-encryption-enforcement --vpc-id vpc-123456789

After updating my resources to support encryption, I can use the console or the CLI to switch to enforce mode.

In the console, I select the VPC encryption control. Then, I select Actions and Switch mode.

Or the equivalent CLI:

aws ec2 modify-vpc-encryption-control --vpc-id vpc-123456789 --mode enforce

How to modify the resources that are identified as nonencrypted?

All your VPC resources must support traffic encryption, either at the hardware layer or at the application layer. For most resources, you don’t need to take any action.

AWS services accessed through AWS PrivateLink and gateway endpoints automatically enforce encryption at the application layer. These services only accept TLS-encrypted traffic. AWS will automatically drop any traffic that isn’t encrypted at the application layer.

When you enable monitor mode, we automatically and gradually migrate your Network Load Balancers, Application Load Balancers, AWS Fargate clusters, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters to hardware that inherently supports encryption. This migration happens transparently without any action required from you.

Some VPC resources require you to select the underlying instances that support modern Nitro hardware-layer encryption. These include EC2 Instances, Auto Scaling groups, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) databases (including Amazon DocumentDB), Amazon ElastiCache node-based clusters, Amazon Redshift provisioned clusters, EKS clusters, ECS with EC2 capacity, MSK Provisioned, Amazon OpenSearch Service, and Amazon EMR. To migrate your Redshift clusters, you must create a new cluster or namespace from a snapshot.

If you use newer-generation instances, you likely already have encryption-compliant infrastructure because all recent instance types support encryption. For older-generation instances that don’t support encryption-in transit, you’ll need to upgrade to supported instance types.

Things to know when using AWS Transit Gateway

When your VPCs with encryption controls enabled are connected via a Transit Gateway, you’ll need to manually activate encryption controls on the Transit Gateway to encrypt traffic between the VPCs. This can be done using the AWS console, the modify-transit-gateway command or API. Enabling encryption on an existing Transit Gateway won’t disrupt the traffic flowing between VPCs attached to the Transit Gateway.

When a Transit Gateway and its attached VPCs have encryption controls in enforce mode (with no exclusions), traffic is encrypted end-to-end.

When creating a Transit Gateway through AWS CloudFormation with encryption support enabled, you need one additional AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permission: ec2:ModifyTransitGateway. This permission is required because CloudFormation uses a two-step process to create a Transit Gateway. It first creates the Transit Gateway with basic configuration, then calls ModifyTransitGateway to enable encryption support. Without this permission, your CloudFormation stack will fail during creation when attempting to apply the encryption configuration, even if you’re only performing what appears to be a create operation.

Pricing and availability

You can start using VPC encryption controls today in these AWS Regions: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (N. California, Oregon), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Melbourne, Mumbai, Osaka, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), Canada West (Calgary), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, Stockholm, Zurich), Middle East (Bahrain, UAE), and South America (São Paulo).

VPC encryption controls is free of cost until March 1, 2026. The VPC pricing page will be updated with details as we get closer to that date.

To learn more, visit the VPC encryption controls documentation or try it out in your AWS account. I look forward to hearing how you use this feature to strengthen your security posture and help you meet compliance standards.

— seb

The post Introducing VPC encryption controls: Enforce encryption in transit within and across VPCs in a Region appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Amazon Prime Day 2025 was the biggest Amazon Prime Day shopping event ever, setting records for both sales volume and total items sold during the 4-day event. Prime members saved billions while shopping Amazon’s millions of deals during the event.

This year marked a significant transformation in the Prime Day experience through advancements in the generative AI offerings from Amazon and AWS. Customers used Alexa+—the Amazon next-generation personal assistant now available in early access to millions of customers—along with the AI-powered shopping assistant, Rufus, and AI Shopping Guides. These features, built on more than 15 years of cloud innovation and machine learning expertise from AWS, combined with deep retail and consumer experience from Amazon, helped customers quickly discover deals and get product information, complementing the fast, free delivery that Prime members enjoy year-round.

As part of our annual tradition to tell you about how AWS powered Prime Day for record-breaking sales, I want to share the services and chart-topping metrics from AWS that made your amazing shopping experience possible.

Prime Day 2025 – all the numbers
During the weeks leading up to big shopping events like Prime Day, Amazon fulfillment centers and delivery stations work to get ready and ensure operations run efficiently and safely. For example, the Amazon automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) operates a global fleet of industrial mobile robots that move goods around Amazon fulfillment centers.

AWS Outposts, a fully managed service that extends the AWS experience on-premises, powers software applications that manage the command-and-control of Amazon ASRS and supports same-day and next-day deliveries through low-latency processing of critical robotic commands.

During Prime Day 2025, AWS Outposts at one of the largest Amazon fulfillment centers sent more than 524 million commands to over 7,000 robots, reaching peak volumes of 8 million commands per hour—a 160 percent increase compared to Prime Day 2024.

Here are some more interesting, mind-blowing metrics:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – During Prime Day 2025, AWS Graviton, a family of processors designed to deliver the best price performance for cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2, powered more than 40 percent of the Amazon EC2 compute used by Amazon.com. Amazon also deployed over 87,000 AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium chips – custom silicon chips for deep learning and generative AI training and inference – to power Amazon Rufus for Prime Day.
• Amazon SageMaker AI — Amazon SageMaker AI, a fully managed service that brings together a broad set of tools to enable high-performance, low-cost machine learning (ML), processed more than 626 billion inference requests during Prime Day 2025.
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Fargate– Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that works seamlessly with AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers. During Prime Day 2025, Amazon ECS launched an average of 18.4 million tasks per day on AWS Fargate, representing a 77 percent increase from the previous year’s Prime Day average.
• AWS Fault Injection Service (AWS FIS) – We ran over 6,800 AWS FIS experiments—over eight times more than we conducted in 2024—to test resilience and ensure Amazon.com remains highly available on Prime Day. This significant increase was made possible by two improvements: new Amazon ECS support for network fault injection experiments on AWS Fargate, and the integration of FIS testing in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
• AWS Lambda – AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service that lets you run code without managing infrastructure, handled over 1.7 trillion invocations per day during Prime Day 2025.
• Amazon API Gateway – During Prime Day 2025, Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it easy to create, maintain, and secure APIs at any scale, processed over 1 trillion internal service requests—a 30 percent increase in requests on average per day compared to Prime Day 2024.
• Amazon CloudFront – Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers content with low latency and high transfer speeds, delivered over 3 trillion HTTP requests during the global week of Prime Day 2025, a 43 percent increase in requests compared to Prime Day 2024.
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) – During Prime Day 2025, Amazon EBS, our high-performance block storage service, peaked at 20.3 trillion I/O operations, moving up to an exabyte of data daily.
• 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 500 billion transactions, stored 4,071 terabytes of data, and transferred 999 terabytes of data.
• 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, these sources made tens of trillions of calls to the DynamoDB API. DynamoDB maintained high availability while delivering single-digit millisecond responses and peaking at 151 million requests per second.
• Amazon ElastiCache – During Prime Day, Amazon ElastiCache, a fully managed caching service delivering microsecond latency, peaked at serving over 1.5 quadrillion daily requests and over 1.4 trillion requests in a minute.
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams – Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, a fully managed serverless data streaming service, processed a peak of 807 million records per second during Prime Day 2025.
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) – During Prime Day 2025, Amazon SQS – a fully managed message queuing service for microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications – set a new peak traffic record of 166 million messages per second.
• Amazon GuardDuty – During Prime Day 2025, Amazon GuardDuty, an intelligent threat detection service, monitored an average of 8.9 trillion log events per hour, a 48.9 percent increase from last year’s Prime Day.
• AWS CloudTrail – AWS CloudTrail, which tracks user activity and API usage on AWS, as well as in hybrid and multicloud environments, processed over 2.5 trillion events during Prime Day 2025, compared to 976 billion events in 2024.

Prepare to scale
If you’re preparing for similar business-critical events, product launches, and migrations, I recommend that you take advantage of our newly branded AWS Countdown (formerly known as AWS Infrastructure Event Management, or IEM). This comprehensive support program helps assess operational readiness, identify and mitigate risks, and plan capacity, using proven playbooks developed by AWS experts. We’ve expanded to include: generative AI implementation support to help you confidently launch and scale AI initiatives; migration and modernization support, including mainframe modernization; and infrastructure optimization for specialized sectors including election systems, retail operations, healthcare services, and sports and gaming events.

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

— Channy

The post AWS services scale to new heights for Prime Day 2025: key metrics and milestones appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

To be honest, I’m still recovering from the AWS Summit in New York, doing my best to level up on launches like Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (Preview) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Vectors. There’s a lot of new stuff to learn!

Meanwhile, it’s been an exciting week for AWS builders focused on reliability and observability. The standout announcement has to be Amazon SQS fair queues, which tackles one of the most persistent challenges in multi-tenant architectures: the “noisy neighbor” problem. If you’ve ever dealt with one tenant’s message processing overwhelming shared infrastructure and affecting other tenants, you’ll appreciate how this feature enables more balanced message distribution across your applications.

On the AI front, we’re also seeing AWS continue to enhance our observability capabilities with the preview launch of Amazon CloudWatch generative AI observability. This brings AI-powered insights directly into your monitoring workflows, helping you understand infrastructure and application performance patterns in new ways. And for those managing Amazon Connect environments, the addition of AWS CloudFormation for message template attachments makes it easier to programmatically deploy and manage email campaign assets across different environments.

Last week’s launches

• Amazon SQS Fair Queues — AWS launched Amazon SQS fair queues to help mitigate the “noisy neighbor” problem in multi-tenant systems, enabling more balanced message processing and improved application resilience across shared infrastructure.
• Amazon CloudWatch Generative AI Observability (Preview) — AWS launched a preview of Amazon CloudWatch generative AI observability, enabling users to gain AI-powered insights into their cloud infrastructure and application performance through advanced monitoring and analysis capabilities.
• Amazon Connect CloudFormation Support for Message Template Attachments —AWS has expanded the capabilities of Amazon Connect by introducing support for AWS CloudFormation for Outbound Campaign message template attachments, enabling customers to programmatically manage and deploy email campaign attachments across different environments.
• Amazon Connect Forecast Editing — Amazon Connect introduces a new forecast editing UI that allows contact center planners to quickly adjust forecasts by percentage or exact values across specific date ranges, queues, and channels for more responsive workforce planning.
• Bloom Filters for Amazon ElastiCache — Amazon ElastiCache now supports Bloom filters in version 8.1 for Valkey, offering a space-efficient way to quickly check if an item is in a set with over 98% memory efficiency compared to traditional sets.
• Amazon EC2 Skip OS Shutdown Option — AWS has introduced a new option for Amazon EC2 that allows customers to skip the graceful operating system shutdown when stopping or terminating instances, enabling faster application recovery and instance state transitions.
• AWS HealthOmics Git Repository Integration — AWS HealthOmics now supports direct Git repository integration for workflow creation, allowing researchers to seamlessly pull workflow definitions from GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket repositories while enabling version control and reproducibility.
• AWS Organizations Tag Policies Wildcard Support — AWS Organizations now supports a wildcard statement (ALL_SUPPORTED) in Tag Policies, allowing users to apply tagging rules to all supported resource types for a given AWS service in a single line, simplifying policy creation and reducing complexity.

Blogs of note

Beyond IAM Access Keys: Modern Authentication Approaches — AWS recommends moving beyond traditional IAM access keys to more secure authentication methods, reducing risks of credential exposure and unauthorized access by leveraging modern, more robust approaches to identity management.

Upcoming AWS events

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

AWS Summits — Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Mexico City (August 6) and Jakarta (August 7).

AWS Community Days — Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Singapore (August 2), Australia (August 15), Adria (September 5), Baltic (September 10), and Aotearoa (September 18).

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: SQS fair queues, CloudWatch generative AI observability, and more (July 28, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last week’s hallmark event was the security-focused AWS re:Inforce conference.

Now a tradition, the blog team wrote a re:Cap post to summarize the announcements and link to some of the top blog posts.

To further summarize, several new security innovations were announced, including enhanced IAM Access Analyzer capabilities, MFA enforcement for root users, and threat intelligence integration with AWS Network Firewall. Other notable updates include exportable public SSL/TLS certificates from AWS Certificate Manager, a simplified AWS WAF console experience, and a new AWS Shield feature for proactive network security (in preview). Additionally, AWS Security Hub has been enhanced for risk prioritization (Preview), and Amazon GuardDuty now supports Amazon EKS clusters.

But my favorite announcement came from the Amazon Verified Permissions team. They released an open source package for Express.js, enabling developers to implement external fine-grained authorization for web application APIs. This simplifies authorization integration, reducing code complexity and improving application security.

The team also published a blog post that outlines how to create a Verified Permissions policy store, add Cedar and Verified Permissions authorisation middleware to your app, create and deploy a Cedar schema, and create and deploy Cedar policies. The Cedar schema is generated from an OpenAPI specification and formatted for use with the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).

Let’s look at last week’s other new announcements.

Last week’s launches
Apart from re:Inforce, here are the launches that got my attention.

Kafka customers use Avro and Protobuf formats for efficient data storage, fast serialization and deserialization, schema evolution support, and interoperability between different programming languages. They utilize schema registries to manage, evolve, and validate schemas before data enters processing pipelines. Previously, you were required to write custom code within your Lambda function to validate, deserialize, and filter events when using these data formats. With this launch, Lambda natively supports Avro and Protobuf, as well as integration with GSR, CCSR, and SCSR. This enables you to process your Kafka events using these data formats without writing custom code. Additionally, you can optimize costs through event filtering to prevent unnecessary function invocations.

• Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports atomic renaming of objects with a single API call – The RenameObject API simplifies data management in S3 directory buckets by transforming a multi-step rename operation into a single API call. This means you can now rename objects in S3 Express One Zone by specifying an existing object’s name as the source and the new name as the destination within the same S3 directory bucket. With no data movement involved, this capability accelerates applications like log file management, media processing, and data analytics, while also lowering costs. For instance, renaming a 1-terabyte log file can now complete in milliseconds, instead of hours, significantly accelerating applications and reducing costs.
• Valkey introduces GLIDE 2.0 with support for Go, OpenTelemetry, and pipeline batching – AWS, in partnership with Google and the Valkey community, announces the general availability of General Language Independent Driver for the Enterprise (GLIDE) 2.0. This is the latest release of one of AWS’s official open-source Valkey client libraries. Valkey, the most permissive open-source alternative to Redis, is stewarded by the Linux Foundation and will always remain open-source. Valkey GLIDE is a reliable, high-performance, multi-language client that supports all Valkey commands

Read moreSkipping the WHM Getting Started Wizard | cPanel Blog GLIDE 2.0 introduces new capabilities that expand developer support, improve observability, and optimise performance for high-throughput workloads. Valkey GLIDE 2.0 extends its multi-language support to Go (contributed by Google), joining Java, Python, and Node.js to provide a consistent, fully compatible API experience across all four languages. More language support is on the way. With this release, Valkey GLIDE now supports OpenTelemetry, an open-source, vendor-neutral framework that enables developers to generate, collect, and export telemetry data and critical client-side performance insights. Additionally, GLIDE 2.0 introduces batching capabilities, reducing network overhead and latency for high-frequency use cases by allowing multiple commands to be grouped and executed as a single operation. You can discover more about Valkey GLIDE in this recent episode of the AWS Developers Podcast: Inside Valkey GLIDE: building a next-gen Valkey client library with Rust.

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

Some other reading
My Belgian compatriot Alexis has written the first article of a two-part series explaining how to develop an MCP Tool server with a streamable HTTP transport and deploy it on Lambda and API Gateway. This is a must-read for anyone implementing MCP servers on AWS. I’m eagerly looking forward to the second part, where Alexis will discuss authentication and authorization for remote MCP servers.

Other AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events.

AWS GenAI Lofts are collaborative spaces and immersive experiences that showcase AWS expertise in cloud computing and AI. They provide startups and developers with hands-on access to AI products and services, exclusive sessions with industry leaders, and valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Find a GenAI Loft location near you and don’t forget to register.

AWS Summits are free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Japan (this week June 25 – 26), Online in India (June 26), New-York City (July 16).

Save the date for these upcoming Summits in July and August: Taipei (July 29), Jakarta (August 7), Mexico (August 8), São Paulo (August 13), and Johannesburg (August 20) (and more to come in September and October).

Browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events here.

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

— seb

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: re:Inforce re:Cap, Valkey GLIDE 2.0, Avro and Protobuf or MCP Servers on Lambda, and more (June 23, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.