Fiti AWS Student Community Kenya!

Last week was an incredible whirlwind: a round of meetups, hands-on workshops, and career discussions across Kenya that culminated with the AWS Student Community Day at Meru University of Science and Technology, with keynotes from my colleagues Veliswa and Tiffany, and sessions on everything from GitOps to cloud-native engineering, and a whole lot of AI agent building.

JAWS Days 2026 is the largest AWS Community Day in the world, with over 1,500 attendees on March 7th. This event started with a keynote speech on building an AI-driven development team by Jeff Barr, and included over 100 technical and community experience sessions, lightning talks, and workshops such as Game Days, Builders Card Challenges, and networking parties.

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

Last week’s launches

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

• Introducing Amazon Connect Health, Agentic AI Built for Healthcare — Amazon Connect Health is now generally available with five purpose-built AI agents for healthcare: patient verification, appointment management, patient insights, ambient documentation, and medical coding. All features are HIPAA-eligible and deployable within existing clinical workflows in days.
• Policy in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is now generally available — You can now use centralized, fine-grained controls for agent-tool interactions that operate outside your agent code. Security and compliance teams can define tool access and input validation rules using natural language that automatically converts to Cedar, the AWS open-source policy language.
• Introducing OpenClaw on Amazon Lightsail to run your autonomous private AI agents — You can deploy a private AI assistant on your own cloud infrastructure with built-in security controls, sandboxed agent sessions, one-click HTTPS, and device pairing authentication. Amazon Bedrock serves as the default model provider, and you can connect to Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Discord.
• AWS announces pricing for VPC Encryption Controls — Starting March 1, 2026, VPC Encryption Controls transitions from free preview to a paid feature. You can audit and enforce encryption-in-transit of all traffic flows within and across VPCs in a region, with monitor mode to detect unencrypted traffic and enforce mode to prevent it.
• Database Savings Plans now supports Amazon OpenSearch Service and Amazon Neptune Analytics — You can save up to 35% on eligible serverless and provisioned instance usage with a one-year commitment. Savings Plans automatically apply regardless of engine, instance family, size, or AWS Region.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk now offers AI-powered environment analysis — When your environment health is degraded, Elastic Beanstalk can now collect recent events, instance health, and logs and send them to Amazon Bedrock for analysis, providing step-by-step troubleshooting recommendations tailored to your environment’s current state.
• AWS simplifies IAM role creation and setup in service workflows — You can now create and configure IAM roles directly within service workflows through a new in-console panel, without switching to the IAM console. The feature supports Amazon EC2, Lambda, EKS, ECS, Glue, CloudFormation, and more.
• Accelerate Lambda durable functions development with new Kiro power — You can now build resilient, long-running multi-step applications and AI workflows faster with AI agent-assisted development in Kiro. The power dynamically loads guidance on replay models, step and wait operations, concurrent execution patterns, error handling, and deployment best practices.
• Amazon GameLift Servers launches DDoS Protection — You can now protect session-based multiplayer games against DDoS attacks with a co-located relay network that authenticates client traffic using access tokens and enforces per-player traffic limits, at no additional cost to GameLift Servers customers.

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

From AWS community

Here are my personal favorite posts from AWS community and my colleagues:

• I Built a Portable AI Memory Layer with MCP, AWS Bedrock, and a Chrome Extension — Learn how to build a persistent memory layer for AI agents using MCP and Amazon Bedrock, packaged as a Chrome extension that carries context across sessions and applications.
• When the Model Is the Machine — Mike Chambers built an experimental app where an AI agent generates a complete, interactive web application at runtime from a single prompt — no codebase, no framework, no persistent state. A thought-provoking exploration of what happens when the model becomes the runtime.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS Community GameDay Europe — Think you know AWS? Prove it at the AWS Community GameDay Europe on March 17, a gamified learning event where teams compete to solve real-world technical challenges using AWS services.
• AWS at NVIDIA GTC 2026 — Join us at our AWS sessions, booths, demos, and ancillary events in NVIDIA GTC 2026 on March 16 – 19, 2026 in San Jose. You can receive 20% off event passes through AWS and request a 1:1 meeting at GTC.
• 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).
• AWS Community Days — Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include Slovakia (March 11), Pune (March 21), and the AWSome Women Summit LATAM in Mexico City (March 28)

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!

— seb

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Connect Health, Bedrock AgentCore Policy, GameDay Europe, and more (March 9, 2026) 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.

Summer has drawn to a close here in Utrecht, where I live in the Netherlands. In two weeks, I’ll be attending AWS Community Day 2025, hosted at the Kinepolis Jaarbeurs Utrecht on September 24. The single-day event will bring together over 500 cloud practitioners from across the Netherlands, featuring 25 breakout sessions across five technical tracks. The day will begin with virtual keynotes at 9:00 AM, followed by parallel breakout sessions focused on practical implementations of serverless architectures and container optimization strategies, providing valuable insights regardless of experience level.

Last year’s AWS Community Day Netherlands 2024 brought together a diverse group of cloud practitioners, speakers, and AWS enthusiasts who contributed to making the community-led conference a valuable knowledge-sharing platform. If you’re planning to attend, feel free to find me there to discuss AWS services or share your cloud implementation experiences!

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

Last week’s launches

AWS Transform assessments now includes detached storage analysis – AWS Transform has expanded its assessment capabilities to analyze on-premises detached storage infrastructure, helping customers determine migration total cost of ownership (TCO). The assessment now evaluates Storage Area Network (SAN), Network Attached Storage (NAS), file servers, object storage, and virtual environments, providing migration recommendations to appropriate AWS services including Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, and Amazon FSx. The tool delivers a comprehensive TCO comparison between current and AWS environments, along with performance and cost optimization recommendations. With storage accounting for up to 45% of total migration opportunities, this enhancement helps customers visualize various AWS migration options. AWS Transform assessment is available in US East (N. Virginia) and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions.

Amazon Bedrock introduces Global Cross-Region inference for Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4 – Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 model in Amazon Bedrock now supports Global cross-Region inference, allowing inference requests to route to any supported commercial AWS Region for processing. This enhancement optimizes available resources and enables higher model throughput by distributing traffic across multiple Regions. Previously, you could select cross-Region inference profiles tied to specific geographies (US, EU, or APAC). The new Global cross-Region inference profile provides additional flexibility for generative AI use cases that don’t require geography-specific processing, helping manage unplanned traffic bursts and increase model throughput. For detailed implementation guidance, visit the Amazon Bedrock documentation.

Amazon Neptune Database adds Public Endpoints support – Amazon Neptune now supports Public Endpoints, enabling direct connections to Neptune databases from outside the VPC without complex networking configurations. This feature helps developers securely access their graph databases from development desktops without requiring VPN connections or bastion hosts, while maintaining security through IAM authentication, VPC security groups, and encryption in transit. Public Endpoints can be enabled for Neptune clusters running engine version 1.4.6 or above through the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDK. The feature is available at no additional cost beyond standard Neptune pricing in all AWS Regions where Neptune Database is offered. Implementation details are available in the Amazon Neptune documentation.

ECS Exec now available in AWS Management Console – Amazon ECS now supports ECS Exec directly in the AWS Management Console, enabling secure, interactive shell access to running containers without requiring inbound ports or SSH key management. Previously available only through API, CLI, or SDKs, this feature streamlines troubleshooting by allowing container access directly from the console interface. You can enable ECS Exec when creating or updating services and standalone tasks, then connect to containers by selecting “Connect” on the task details page, which opens an interactive session through CloudShell. The console also displays the underlying AWS CLI command for use in local terminals. This feature is available in all AWS commercial Regions and documented in the ECS developer guide.

Organizational Notification Configurations for AWS User Notifications now generally available – AWS User Notifications now supports Organizational Notification Configurations, helping AWS Organizations users centrally configure and view notifications across their organization. Management accounts or delegated administrators can configure notifications for specific organizational units or all accounts in an organization. The service supports configuring notifications for any supported Amazon EventBridge event, such as console sign-ins without MFA, with notifications appearing in the admin’s Console Notifications Center and AWS Console Mobile Application. User Notifications supports up to five delegated administrators and is available in all AWS Regions where AWS User Notifications is offered. For implementation details, visit the AWS User Notifications user guide.

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

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

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: Zurich (September 11), Los Angeles (September 17), and Bogotá (October 9).

AWS re:Invent 2025 – Join us in Las Vegas between December 1–5 as cloud pioneers gather from across the globe for the latest AWS innovations, peer-to-peer learning, expert-led discussions, and invaluable networking opportunities. Don’t forget to explore the event catalog.

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: Baltic (September 10), Aotearoa (September 18), South Africa (September 20), Bolivia (September 20), Portugal (September 27).

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!

— Esra

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 Transform, Amazon Neptune, and more (September 8, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

AWS Summit season starts this week! These free events are now rolling out worldwide, bringing our cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn. Whether you prefer joining us online or in-person, these gatherings offer valuable opportunities to expand your AWS knowledge. I will be attending the Summit in Paris this week, the biggest cloud conference in France, and the London Summit at the end of the month. We will have a small podcast recording studio where I will interview French and British customers to produce new episodes for the AWS Developers Podcast and le podcast 🎙 AWS ☁️ en 🇫🇷.

Register today!

But for now, let’s look at last week’s new announcements.

Last week’s launches
At KubeCon London, we introduced the EKS Community Add-Ons Catalog, making it simpler for Kubernetes users to enhance their Amazon EKS clusters with powerful open-source tools. This catalog streamlines the installation of essential add-ons like metrics-server, kube-state-metrics, prometheus-node-exporter, cert-manager, and external-dns. By integrating these community-driven add-ons directly into the Amazon EKS console and AWS command line interface (AWS CLI), customers can reduce operational complexity and accelerate deployment while maintaining flexibility and security. This launch reflects AWS’s commitment to the Kubernetes community, providing seamless access to trusted open-source solutions without the overhead of manual installation and maintenance.

Amazon Q Developer now integrates with Amazon OpenSearch Service to enhance operational analytics by enabling natural language exploration and AI-assisted data visualization. This integration simplifies the process of querying and visualizing operational data, reducing the learning curve associated with traditional query languages and tools. During incident responses, Amazon Q Developer offers contextual summaries and insights directly within the alerts interface, facilitating quicker analysis and resolution. This advancement allows engineers to focus more on innovation by streamlining troubleshooting processes and improving monitoring infrastructure.

Amazon API Gateway now supports dual-stack (IPv4 and IPv6) endpoints across all endpoint types, custom domains, and management APIs in both commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This enhancement allows REST, HTTP, and WebSocket APIs, as well as custom domains, to handle requests from both IPv4 and IPv6 clients, facilitating a smoother transition to IPv6 and addressing IPv4 address scarcity. Additionally, AWS continues its commitment to IPv6 adoption with recent updates, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) introducing dual-stack public endpoints for seamless connections over IPv4 and IPv6 and AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) enabling customers to manage resource shares using IPv6 addresses. Amazon Security Lake customers can also now use Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) addresses via new dual-stack endpoints to configure and manage the service. These advancements collectively ensure broader compatibility and future-proofing of network infrastructure.

​Amazon SES has introduced support for email attachments in its v2 APIs, enabling users to include files like PDFs and images directly in their emails without manually constructing MIME messages. This enhancement simplifies the process of sending rich email content and reduces implementation complexity. Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) supports attachments in all AWS Regions where the service is available.

Amazon Neptune has updated its Service Level Agreement (SLA) to offer a 99.99% Monthly Uptime Percentage for Multi-AZ DB Instance, Multi-AZ DB Cluster, and Multi-AZ Graph configurations, up from the previous 99.9%. This enhancement demonstrates the commitment AWS has to providing highly available and reliable graph database services for mission-critical applications. The improved SLA is now available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Neptune is offered.

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

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.

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!

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The post AWS Weekly Review: Amazon EKS, Amazon OpenSearch, Amazon API Gateway, and more (April 7, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.