There’s something genuinely energizing about working with startups — something I’ve been doing intensely for more than two years now. Startups operate at a different frequency: the urgency is real, the constraints are tight, and the stakes are personal. Helping them navigate the challenge of proving their business model requires not just technical depth but a willingness to move fast, challenge assumptions, and make bets on the right architecture before the perfect data exists.

What I love most is that the work is never abstract: every decision I help a startup make has a direct impact on whether they ship on time, stay within budget, and earn the next round of confidence from their investors.

Let’s dive into this week’s AWS news.

Headlines

Now Open — AWS Local Zones in Istanbul, Türkiye — AWS has opened a new Local Zone in Istanbul, Türkiye, bringing AWS compute, storage, and networking services to one of Europe’s largest metropolitan areas. AWS Local Zones place AWS infrastructure much closer to large population and industry, enabling organizations to store and process data within specific jurisdictions to meet data residency requirements, while delivering single-digit millisecond latency for applications that need to run closer to end users. This supports compliance needs across financial services, government, telecoms, and healthcare.

A Local Zone is a significant infrastructure investment: it requires the same level of operational excellence as a Region, with consistent hardware, power, and networking infrastructure, and reflects AWS’s continued expansion into underserved markets.

For builders in Türkiye, this opens up a new set of architectural possibilities. You can now store and back up data within Turkish borders to help meet data residency requirements, and run latency-sensitive workloads in the Istanbul Local Zone while connecting seamlessly to the AWS Region—giving you the flexibility to architect hybrid applications without managing your own data center infrastructure.

To learn more about our decade-long commitment, available services, customers and partners in Türkiye, visit the launch blog post.

Last week’s launches

Here are some launches and updates that caught my attention:

• Security Hub Extended expands to 21 curated partner solutions across 9 categories — AWS Security Hub Extended now integrates with 21 curated partner security solutions spanning 9 categories, including endpoint protection, cloud security posture management, threat intelligence, and more. You can now get consolidated, prioritized security findings from a broader ecosystem of tools directly within Security Hub, without requiring custom integrations. This is particularly valuable for enterprise security teams that want a unified view of their security posture across AWS and third-party tooling.
• Amazon SageMaker AI now supports OpenAI-compatible APIs for inference endpoints — You can now call Amazon SageMaker AI inference endpoints using OpenAI-compatible APIs, making it significantly easier to migrate AI workloads from OpenAI to SageMaker — or to build applications that work across multiple providers — with no SDK changes required. This lowers the migration barrier for teams that started prototyping with OpenAI and are now looking to move to a more scalable, cost-controlled infrastructure on AWS. Your existing application code works as-is; you simply point it at your SageMaker endpoint.
• Introducing pre-fetching and IAM role assumption for AWS Secrets Manager Agent — The AWS Secrets Manager Agent can now pre-fetch secrets at startup and assume IAM roles to retrieve them, eliminating the cold-start latency associated with on-demand secret retrieval in latency-sensitive applications. You can configure the agent to preload the secrets your application needs before it starts serving traffic, reducing the risk of secrets-related latency spikes in production. IAM role assumption support also makes it easier to share the agent across workloads with different permission boundaries.
• AWS announces ExtendDB, an open-source DynamoDB-compatible adapter — AWS has open-sourced ExtendDB, a DynamoDB-compatible adapter that allows you to use the DynamoDB API and data model on top of alternative backend storage systems. This is particularly useful for local development and testing workflows — you can write against the DynamoDB API without requiring a live AWS connection. It’s also valuable for scenarios where you need DynamoDB-compatible semantics with more control over the underlying storage layer. It’s a practical tool for teams that want to build portability into their data access layer.
• AWS SAM CLI adds AWS CloudFormation Language Extensions support to accelerate local serverless development — The AWS SAM CLI now supports AWS CloudFormation Language Extensions locally, meaning you can use transforms, dynamic references, and other CloudFormation language features directly in your local development and testing workflows. This closes a long-standing gap between what you can test locally and what runs in production, making local serverless development faster and more reliable. If you build serverless applications with SAM and encounter edge cases in local testing, this update will meaningfully improve your experience.

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:

• Amazon Bedrock introduces new advanced prompt optimization and migration tool — This post covers the newly launched Advanced Prompt Optimization and Migration Tool in Amazon Bedrock, which helps you automatically tune your prompts for better model performance and assists you in migrating prompts across different foundation models. It’s a must-read if you’re iterating on prompt quality for production AI workloads.
• Introducing Kiro Web — Kiro, AWS’s AI-powered development environment, now has a web-based interface. Kiro Web lets you access Kiro’s spec-driven development, AI chat, and agent capabilities directly from your browser, without needing to install the desktop IDE. This is a great step toward making AI-assisted development more accessible — whether you’re doing a quick review, prototyping from a new machine, or introducing your team to the Kiro workflow.
• Announcing updated retry behavior for AWS SDKs and Tools — AWS has updated the default retry behavior across its SDKs and CLI tools, improving resilience for transient errors without requiring configuration changes from developers. The updated behavior includes smarter backoff strategies and better handling of throttling responses. If you’re running production workloads that occasionally hit API rate limits or transient failures, this update improves reliability out of the box. It’s worth reading to understand what changed and how it affects your applications.
• Bitnami image removal from ECR Public — AWS has announced that Bitnami container images will be removed from Amazon ECR Public. If your workloads pull Bitnami images from ECR Public, you should review this post to understand the timeline and migration path. The Bitnami images remain available directly from Bitnami’s own registry, and this post explains how to update your image references to continue pulling them without interruption.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for these events:

• AWS Summit Amsterdam — Join us in Amsterdam on May 27 for a full day of cloud and AI sessions, hands-on labs, and networking with builders and AWS experts from across Europe. Registration is free.
• AWS Summit Bangkok — AWS Summit Bangkok takes place on May 28. It’s a fantastic opportunity for builders and customers across Southeast Asia to connect and explore the latest in cloud innovation.
• AWS Summit Milan — Also on May 28, AWS Summit Milan brings the AWS community together in Italy. If you’re in Southern Europe, this is your event.
• AWS Summit Mumbai — Also on May 28, AWS Summit Mumbai brings cloud and AI content to builders across India. Check the link for the full agenda and registration.
• AWS Summit Los Angeles — Mark your calendar for June 10 in Los Angeles. The AWS Summit LA is coming up and it’s a great opportunity to connect with the West Coast builder community.
• AWS Community Days — Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders. If you’re in Latin America, don’t miss AWS Community Day Belo Horizonte on 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: AWS Local Zones in Istanbul, open-source ExtendDB, Kiro Web, and more (May 25, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Modern organizations manage data across multiple disconnected systems—structured databases, unstructured files, and separate visualization tools—creating barriers that slow analytics workflows and limit insight generation. Separate visualization platforms often create barriers that prevent teams from extracting comprehensive business insights.

These disconnected workflows prevent your organizations from maximizing your data investments, creating delays in decision making and missed opportunities for comprehensive analysis that combines multiple data types.

Starting today, you can use three new capabilities in Amazon SageMaker to accelerate your path from raw data to actionable insights:

• Amazon QuickSight integration – Launch Amazon QuickSight directly from Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio to build dashboards using your project data, then publish them to the Amazon SageMaker Catalog for broader discovery and sharing across your organization.
• Amazon SageMaker adds support for Amazon S3 general purpose buckets and Amazon S3 Access Grants in SageMaker Catalog– Make data stored in Amazon S3 general purpose buckets easier for teams to find, access, and collaborate on all types of data including unstructured data, while maintaining fine-grained access control using Amazon S3 Access Grants.
• Automatic data onboarding from your lakehouse – Automatic onboarding of existing AWS Glue Data Catalog (GDC) datasets from the lakehouse architecture into SageMaker Catalog, without manual setup.

These new SageMaker capabilities address the complete data lifecycle within a unified and governed experience. You get automatic onboarding of existing structured data from your lakehouse, seamless cataloging of unstructured data content in Amazon S3, and streamlined visualization through QuickSight—all with consistent governance and access controls.

Let’s take a closer look at each capability.

Amazon SageMaker and Amazon QuickSight Integration
With this integration, you can build dashboards in Amazon QuickSight using data from your Amazon SageMaker projects. When you launch QuickSight from Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, Amazon SageMaker automatically creates the QuickSight dataset and organizes it in a secured folder accessible only to project members.

Furthermore, the dashboards you build stay within this folder and automatically appear as assets in your SageMaker project, where you can publish them to the SageMaker Catalog and share them with users or groups in your corporate directory. This keeps your dashboards organized, discoverable, and governed within SageMaker Unified Studio.

To use this integration, both your Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio domain and QuickSight account must be integrated with AWS IAM Identity Center using the same IAM Identity Center instance. Additionally, your QuickSight account must exist in the same AWS account where you want to enable the QuickSight blueprint. You can learn more about the prerequisites on Documentation page. 

After these prerequisites are met, you can enable the blueprint for Amazon QuickSight by navigating to the Amazon SageMaker console and choosing the Blueprints tab. Then find Amazon QuickSight and follow the instructions.

You also need to configure your SQL analytics project profile to include Amazon QuickSight in Add blueprint deployment settings.

To learn more on onboarding setup, refer to the Documentation page.

Then, when you create a new project, you need to use the SQL analytics profile.

With your project created, you can start building visualizations with QuickSight. You can navigate to the Data tab, select the table or view to visualize, and choose Open in QuickSight under Actions.

This will redirect you to the Amazon QuickSight transactions dataset page and you can choose USE IN ANALYSIS to begin exploring the data.

When you create a project with the QuickSight blueprint, SageMaker Unified Studio automatically provisions a restricted QuickSight folder per project where SageMaker scopes all new assets—analyses, datasets, and dashboards. The integration maintains real-time folder permission sync, keeping QuickSight folder access permissions aligned with project membership.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) general purpose buckets integration
Starting today, SageMaker adds support for S3 general purpose buckets in SageMaker Catalog to increase discoverability and allows granular permissions through S3 Access Grants, enabling users to govern data, including sharing and managing permissions. Data consumers, such as data scientists, engineers, and business analysts, can now discover and access S3 assets through SageMaker Catalog. This expansion also enables data producers to govern security controls on any S3 data asset through a single interface.

To use this integration, you need appropriate S3 general purpose bucket permissions, and your SageMaker Unified Studio projects must have access to the S3 buckets containing your data. Learn more about prerequisites on Amazon S3 data in Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio Documentation page.

You can add a connection to an existing S3 bucket.

When it’s connected, you can browse accessible folders and create discoverable assets by choosing on the bucket or a folder and selecting Publish to Catalog.

This action creates a SageMaker Catalog asset of type “S3 Object Collection” and opens an asset details page where users can augment business context to improve search and discoverability. Once published, data consumers can discover and subscribe to these cataloged assets. When data consumers subscribe to “S3 Object Collection” assets, SageMaker Catalog automatically grants access using S3 Access Grants upon approval, enabling cross-team collaboration while ensuring only the right users have the right access.

When you have access, now you can process your unstructured data in Amazon SageMaker Jupyter notebook. Following screenshot is an example to process image in medical use case.

If you have structured data, you can query your data using Amazon Athena or process using Spark in notebooks.

With this access granted through S3 Access Grants, you can seamlessly incorporate S3 data into my workflows—analyzing it in notebooks, combining it with structured data in the lakehouse and Amazon Redshift for comprehensive analytics. You can access unstructured data such as documents, images in JupyterLab notebooks to train ML models, or generate queryable insights.

Automatic data onboarding from your lakehouse
This integration automatically onboards all your lakehouse datasets into SageMaker Catalog. The key benefit for you is to bring AWS Glue Data Catalog (GDC) datasets into SageMaker Catalog, eliminating manual setup for cataloging, sharing, and governing them centrally.

This integration requires an existing lakehouse setup with Data Catalog containing your structured datasets.

When you set up a SageMaker domain, SageMaker Catalog automatically ingests metadata from all lakehouse databases and tables. This means you can immediately explore and use these datasets from within SageMaker Unified Studio without any configuration.

The integration helps you to start managing, governing, and consuming these assets from within SageMaker Unified Studio, applying the same governance policies and access controls you can use for other data types while unifying technical and business metadata.

Additional things to know
Here are a couple of things to note:

• Availability – These integrations are available in all commercial AWS Regions where Amazon SageMaker is supported.
• Pricing – Standard SageMaker Unified Studio, QuickSight, and Amazon S3 pricing applies. No additional charges for the integrations themselves.
• Documentation – You can find complete setup guides in the SageMaker Unified Studio Documentation.

Get started with these new integrations through the Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio console.

Happy building!
— Donnie

The post Streamline the path from data to insights with new Amazon SageMaker Catalog capabilities appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

As we celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD) this March, I had the privilege of attending the ‘Women in Tech’ User Group meetup in Shenzhen last weekend. I was inspired to see over 100 women in tech from different industries come together to discuss AI ethics from a female perspective. Together, we explored strategies such as reducing gender bias in AI systems and promoting diverse representation in model training data. In the AWS Cloud Lab, participants used Amazon Bedrock with large language models (LLMs) to generate rose bloom videos, which was the most popular part of this meetup.

These gatherings are crucial to our efforts to engage more women in AI technology exploration and development, and to help make sure that the generative AI era evolves without gender bias. The collaborative spirit and technical curiosity displayed throughout the event is further proof that diverse teams truly build inclusive and effective solutions.

Speaking of vibrant community engagement, I also had the honor of presenting at Kubernetes Community Day (KCD) Beijing 2025 this weekend. The enthusiasm for container technologies was remarkable, with nearly 300 developers gathering to share experiences and best practices.

During my keynote introducing the DoEKS project from Amazon Web Services (AWS), I was struck by the depth of interest in managed Kubernetes services. The audience’s questions revealed how widely adopted services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) have become among Chinese developers building mission-critical applications.

This strong community interest aligns perfectly with findings from the Omdia Universe: Cloud Container Management & Services 2024–25 report. In this comprehensive evaluation of container management solutions hosted on public clouds, AWS was recognized as a Leader.

The report specifically highlights that AWS offers “widest range of options for working with Kubernetes or its own container management service, across cloud, edge, and on-premises environments.” You can read the full report about AWS offerings to learn more about our comprehensive container portfolio and how we’re helping builders deploy scalable, reliable containerized applications.

Last Week’s launches

In addition to the inspiring community events, here are some AWS launches that caught my attention.

Amazon Q Business browser extension gets upgrades – The Amazon Q Business browser extension now features significant enhancements designed to streamline browser-based tasks. Users gain access to their company’s indexed knowledge alongside web content, direct PDF support within the browser, image file attachment capabilities, and controls to remove irrelevant attachments from conversation context. The expanded context window accommodates larger web pages and more detailed prompts, resulting in more helpful responses. For advanced needs, the extension offers seamless transition to the full Amazon Q Business web experience with access to Actions and Amazon Q Apps. Review the Enhancing web browsing with Amazon Q Business in the documentation for detailed setup instructions and feature descriptions to learn more about this announcement.

Amazon Bedrock RAG evaluation is now generally available – Offering comprehensive assessment of both Bedrock Knowledge Bases and custom Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems through LLM-as-a-judge methodology. The service evaluates retrieval quality and end-to-end generation with metrics for relevance, correctness, and hallucination detection, and the newly added support for custom RAG pipeline evaluations lets you bring your own input-output pairs and retrieved contexts directly into the evaluation job, along with new citation precision metrics and Amazon Bedrock Guardrails integration for more flexible RAG system optimization. To learn more, visit the Amazon Bedrock Evaluations page and What is Amazon Bedrock? in the documentation.

Amazon Nova expands Tool Choice options for Converse API – We’ve enhanced Amazon Nova with expanded Tool Choice capabilities for the Converse API, giving developers more flexibility in building sophisticated AI applications. This update allows models to determine when to use tools to fulfill user requests more effectively. Learn more in the announcement about expands Tool Choice options.

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails adds policy-based enforcement for responsible AI – Our builders can now enforce responsible AI policies at scale with Amazon Bedrock Guardrails’ new AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy-based enforcement capabilities. This feature helps you to specify required guardrails through IAM policies using the bedrock:GuardrailIdentifiercondition key, so that all model inference calls comply with your organization’s AI safety standards. When your teams make Amazon Bedrock Invoke or Converse API calls, requests are automatically rejected if they don’t include the mandated guardrails, providing consistent protection against undesirable content, sensitive information exposure, and model hallucinations. Refer to the Set up permissions to use Guaidrails for content filtering in the technical documentation and the Amazon Bedrock Guardrails product page to learn more about the announcement about policy based enforcement for responsible AI.

Next generation of Amazon Connect released – We’ve launched the next generation of Amazon Connect, featuring AI-powered interactions designed to strengthen customer relationships and improve business outcomes. This major update brings enhanced agent experiences, smarter customer interactions, and deeper operational insights to contact centers of all sizes. Learn more from the new launch post in the AWS Contact Center Blog.

Amazon Redshift Serverless introduces Current and Trailing release tracks – Amazon Redshift Serverless now offers two release tracks to give users more control over their update cadence. The Current track delivers the most up-to-date certified release with the latest features and security updates, while the Trailing track remains on the previous certified release. This dual-track approach allows organizations to validate new releases on select workgroups before implementing them across production environments. Users can easily switch between tracks through the Amazon Redshift console, providing the flexibility to balance innovation with stability for mission-critical workloads. This capability is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Redshift Serverless is offered. Refer to Tracks for Amazon Redshift provisioned cluster and serverless work groups to learn more about the Current and Trailing tracks in Amazon Redshift Serverless.

AWS WAF now supports URI fragment field matching – AWS WAF has expanded its capability to include URI fragment field matching, allowing security teams to create rules that inspect and match against the fragment portion of URLs. This enhancement enables more precise security controls for web applications that use URI fragments to identify specific sections within pages. Security professionals can now implement more targeted protections, such as restricting access to sensitive page elements, detecting suspicious navigation patterns, and enhancing bot mitigation by analyzing fragment usage patterns characteristic of automated attacks. This feature is available in all AWS Regions where AWS WAF is supported. For more information about URI field for matching, visit the AWS WAF Developer Guide.

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

Other AWS news

Here are some other additional projects and blog posts that you might find interesting.

Build your generative AI skills at AWS Gen AI Lofts – AWS has established more than 10 global hubs offering training and networking for developers and startups in 2025, where you can gain practical, hands-on experience with the latest AI technologies. These revamped spaces feature dedicated zones where you can participate in workshops on prompt engineering, foundation model (FM) selection, and implementing AI in production environments. If you’re near San Francisco, New York, Tokyo, or other major tech hubs with AWS Gen AI Lofts, stop by to access these free resources and accelerate your generative AI development skills. Check out all of the AWS Gen AI Loft locations and events and to read 5 ways to build your AI skills on AWS Gen AI Loft to learn more.

AWS Lambda‘s architecture for billions of asynchronous invocations – A recent technical article reveals how AWS Lambda handles massive scale through sophisticated engineering approaches. The Lambda asynchronous invocation path employs multiple queuing strategies, consistent hashing for intelligent partitioning, and shuffle-sharding techniques to minimize noisy neighbor effects. The system relies on key observability metrics (AsyncEventReceived, AsyncEventAge, and AsyncEventDropped) to maintain optimal performance. These architectural decisions enable Lambda to process tens of trillions of monthly invocations across 1.5 million active customers while providing reliable scalability and performance isolation. For details read Handling billions of invocations – best practices from AWS Lambda in the AWS computing blog.

AWS is reducing prices by more than 11% for its high-memory U7i instances across all Regions and pricing models. The reduction applies to four instances: u7i-12tb.224xlarge, u7in-16tb.224xlarge, u7in-24tb.224xlarge, and u7in-32tb.224xlarge. The new On-Demand pricing, which covers shared, dedicated, and host tenancy options is retroactive, to March 1, 2025. For new Savings Plan purchases, pricing is effective immediately.

Create your AWS Builder ID and reserve your alias – Builder ID is a universal login credential that gives you access beyond the AWS Management Console to AWS tools and resources, including over 600 free training courses, community features, and developer tools such as Amazon Q Developer.

From community.aws
Here are some of my favorite posts from community.aws.

Model Context Protocol (MCP): why it matters – The recently introduced Model Context Protocol (MCP) creates a standardized way for AI applications to communicate with multiple FMs using consistent prompts and tools.

Build serverless GenAI Apps faster with Amazon Q Developer CLI agent – Discover how Amazon Q Developer CLI Agent revolutionizes cloud development by building a complete serverless generative AI application in minutes instead of days.

Automating code reviews with Amazon Q and GitHub actions – A new developer tutorial demonstrates how to integrate Amazon Q Developer with GitHub Actions to automatically analyze pull requests and provide AI-powered code feedback.

DeepSeek on AWS – A new technical guide demonstrates how to deploy DeepSeek’s powerful open-source AI models on AWS infrastructure. The tutorial provides step-by-step instructions for setting up these cutting-edge models using Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with GPUs, or through integration with Amazon Bedrock. The guide covers optimization techniques, sample applications, and best practices for balancing performance with cost efficiency.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these upcoming AWS events.

Empowering Futures – Women Leading the Way in Tech and Non-Tech Careers – Whether you’re here to expand your professional circle, learn about the AWS Cloud or gain wisdom from inspiring speakers, this event has something for everyone. This is a public event open to everyone in the Seattle area—for free—on March 27, 2025.

AWS at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon London 2025 – Join us at KubeCon London on April 1 – April 4 , at Excel booth S300 for live product demonstrations that help you simplify Kubernetes operations, optimize costs and performance, harness the power of artificial learning and machine learning (AI/ML), and build scalable platform strategies.

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

– Betty

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

How is the News Blog doing? Take this 1 minute survey!

(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Omdia recognition, Amazon Bedrock RAG evaluation, International Women’s Day events, and more (March 24, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the fifth annual AWS Pi Day on March 14. Since its inception in 2021, commemorating the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) 15th anniversary, AWS Pi Day has grown into a flagship event highlighting the transformative power of cloud technologies in data management, analytics, and AI.

This year’s virtual event featured in-depth discussions with Amazon Web Services (AWS) product teams showcasing our continued innovation in helping customers build robust data foundations for analytics and AI workloads.

Missed the live event? You can still access all content on-demand at the event page. Whether you’re developing data lakehouses, training AI models, creating generative AI applications, or optimizing analytics workloads, the shared insights will help you maximize the value of your data.

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

Amazon Bedrock now supports multi-agent collaboration – With the availability of multi-agent collaboration in Amazon Bedrock, you can create networks of specialized agents that communicate and coordinate under the guidance of a supervisor agent. You can build, deploy, and manage networks of AI agents that work together to execute complex, multi-step workflows efficiently.

Availability of fully managed DeepSeek-R1 model in Amazon Bedrock – AWS is the first cloud service provider (CSP) to deliver DeepSeek-R1 as a fully managed, generally available model. Use the capabilities of DeepSeek-R1 for your generative AI applications with a single API through this fully managed service in Amazon Bedrock.

Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio is now generally available – You can now use Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio as your single data and AI development environment, where you can find and access all of your organization’s data and work using the best tools for your specific needs. With the new simplified permissions management, you can easily bring your existing AWS resources into the unified studio. You’ll be able to find, access, and query your organization’s data and AI assets while collaborating with your team to securely build and share your analytics and AI artifacts—from data and models to generative AI applications.

Amazon Bedrock’s capabilities now generally available within Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio – SageMaker Unified Studio brings selected capabilities from Amazon Bedrock into SageMaker. You can now rapidly prototype, customize, and share generative AI applications using foundation models (FMs) and advanced features such as Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, Amazon Bedrock Agents, and Amazon Bedrock Flows to create tailored solutions aligned with your requirements and responsible AI guidelines all within SageMaker.

Amazon S3 Tables integration with Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse is now generally available – Amazon S3 Tables now seamlessly integrate with Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse, making it easy for you to query and join S3 Tables with data in S3 data lakes, Amazon Redshift data warehouses, and third-party data sources. S3 Tables deliver the first cloud object store with built-in Apache Iceberg support.

Amazon S3 Tables now support create and query table operations directly from the S3 console using Amazon Athena – Amazon S3 Tables adds create and query table support in the S3 console. With this new feature, you can now create a table, populate it with data, and query it directly from the S3 console using Amazon Athena, making it easier to get started and analyze data in S3 table buckets.

Amazon S3 reduces pricing for S3 object tagging by 35% – Amazon S3 reduces pricing for S3 object tagging by 35% in all AWS Regions to $0.0065 per 10,000 tags per month. Object tags are key-value pairs applied to S3 objects that can be created, updated, or deleted at any time during the lifetime of the object.

Serverless Land Patterns available in Visual Studio Code – Serverless Land‘s extensive application pattern library is now available directly into the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) IDE, making it easier for developers to build serverless applications. This integration eliminates the need to switch between your development environment and external resources when building serverless architectures by enabling you to browse, search, and implement pre-built serverless patterns directly in VS Code IDE.

Amplify Hosting Announces Skew Protection Support – AWS Amplify Hosting now offers Skew Protection, a feature that guarantees version consistency across your deployments. This feature ensures frontend requests are always routed to the correct server backend version—eliminating version skew and making deployments more reliable.

Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow introduces a new visual editor to improve DNS policy editing – Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow now offers an enhanced user interface for improved DNS traffic policy editing. With this release, you can more easily understand and change the way traffic is routed between users and endpoints using the new features of the visual editor.

From community.aws
Here are some of my favorite posts from community.aws. Create your AWS Builder ID to start sharing your tips and connect with fellow builders. Your Builder ID is a universal login credential that gives you access, beyond the AWS Management Console, to AWS tools and resources, including over 600 free training courses, community features, and developer tools such as Amazon Q Developer.

Seamless SQL Server Recovery on EC2 with AWS Systems Manager (Greg Vinton) – This guide explains how to use the AWSEC2-RestoreSqlServerDatabaseWithVss automation runbook to restore a Microsoft SQL Server database on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance.

Secure Deployment Strategies in Amazon EKS with Azure DevOps (Abhishek Nanda) – Build and Deploy containerized applications on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) using Azure DevOps.

Connect Your Favorite LLM Client to Bedrock (Qinjie Zhang) – It’s common to use desktop applications like MSTY, Chatbox AI, LM Studio to simplify the use of Large Language Models (LLM) models. This blog provides a step-by-step guide on how you can connect your favorite local LLM clients to Amazon Bedrock.

From PHP to Python with the help of Amazon Q Developer (Ricardo Sueiras) – In this blog post, Ricardo showcases how to use Amazon Q Developer CLI to refactor code from one programming language to another.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these upcoming AWS events:

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: Milan, Italy (April 2), Bay Area – Security Edition (April 4), Timișoara, Romania (April 10), and Prague, Czech Republic (April 29).

AWS Innovate: Generative AI + Data – Join a free online conference focusing on generative AI and data innovations in Latin America on April 8.

AWS Summits – The AWS Summit season is coming along! 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: Paris (April 9), Amsterdam (April 16), London (April 30), and Poland (May 5).

AWS re:Inforce (June 16–18) – Our annual learning event devoted to all things AWS Cloud security in Philadelphia, PA. Registration opens in March, so be ready to join more than 5,000 security builders and leaders.

AWS DevDays are free, technical events where developers can learn about some of the hottest topics in cloud computing. DevDays offer hands-on workshops, technical sessions, live demos, and networking with AWS technical experts and your peers. Register to access AWS DevDays sessions on demand.

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!

How is the News Blog doing? Take this 1 minute survey!

(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Pi Day, Amazon Bedrock multi-agent collaboration, Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, Amazon S3 Tables, and more appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Every year on March 14 (3.14), AWS Pi Day highlights AWS innovations that help you manage and work with your data. What started in 2021 as a way to commemorate the fifteenth launch anniversary of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) has now grown into an event that highlights how cloud technologies are transforming data management, analytics, and AI.

This year, AWS Pi Day returns with a focus on accelerating analytics and AI innovation with a unified data foundation on AWS. The data landscape is undergoing a profound transformation as AI emerges in most enterprise strategies, with analytics and AI workloads increasingly converging around a lot of the same data and workflows. You need an easy way to access all your data and use all your preferred analytics and AI tools in a single integrated experience. This AWS Pi Day, we’re introducing a slate of new capabilities that help you build unified and integrated data experiences.

The next generation of Amazon SageMaker: The center of all your data, analytics, and AI
At re:Invent 2024, we introduced the next generation of Amazon SageMaker, the center of all your data, analytics, and AI. SageMaker includes virtually all the components you need for data exploration, preparation and integration, big data processing, fast SQL analytics, machine learning (ML) model development and training, and generative AI application development. With this new generation of Amazon SageMaker, SageMaker Lakehouse provides you with unified access to your data and SageMaker Catalog helps you to meet your governance and security requirements. You can read the launch blog post written by my colleague Antje to learn more details.

Core to the next generation of Amazon SageMaker is SageMaker Unified Studio, a single data and AI development environment where you can use all your data and tools for analytics and AI. SageMaker Unified Studio is now generally available.

SageMaker Unified Studio facilitates collaboration among data scientists, analysts, engineers, and developers as they work on data, analytics, AI workflows, and applications. It provides familiar tools from AWS analytics and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) services, including data processing, SQL analytics, ML model development, and generative AI application development, into a single user experience. To explore the benefits of SageMaker Unified Studio, read Accelerate analytics and AI innovation with the next generation of Amazon SageMaker, by analytics leaders at AWS.

SageMaker Unified Studio also brings selected capabilities from Amazon Bedrock into SageMaker. You can now rapidly prototype, customize, and share generative AI applications using foundation models (FMs) and advanced features such as Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, Amazon Bedrock Agents, and Amazon Bedrock Flows to create tailored solutions aligned with your requirements and responsible AI guidelines all within SageMaker.

Last but not least, Amazon Q Developer is now generally available in SageMaker Unified Studio. Amazon Q Developer provides generative AI powered assistance for data and AI development. It helps you with tasks like writing SQL queries, building extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs, and troubleshooting, and is available in the Free tier and Pro tier for existing subscribers.

You can learn more about the general availability of SageMaker Unified Studio in this recent blog post written by my colleague Donnie.

During re:Invent 2024, we also launched Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse as part of the next generation of SageMaker. SageMaker Lakehouse unifies all your data across Amazon S3 data lakes, Amazon Redshift data warehouses, and third-party and federated data sources. It helps you build powerful analytics and AI/ML applications on a single copy of your data. SageMaker Lakehouse gives you the flexibility to access and query your data in-place with Apache Iceberg–compatible tools and engines. In addition, zero-ETL integrations automate the process of bringing data into SageMaker Lakehouse from AWS data sources such as Amazon Aurora or Amazon DynamoDB and from applications such as Salesforce, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, ServiceNow, SAP, Zendesk, and Zoho CRM. The full list of integrations is available in the SageMaker Lakehouse FAQ.

Building a data foundation with Amazon S3
Building a data foundation is the cornerstone of accelerating analytics and AI workloads, enabling organizations to seamlessly manage, discover, and utilize their data assets at any scale. Amazon S3 is the world’s best place to build a data lake, with virtually unlimited scale, and it provides the essential foundation for this transformation.

I’m always astonished to learn about the scale at which we operate Amazon S3: It currently holds over 400 trillion objects, exabytes of data, and processes a mind-blowing 150 million requests per second. Just a decade ago, not even 100 customers were storing more than a petabyte (PB) of data on S3. Today, thousands of customers have surpassed the 1 PB milestone.

Amazon S3 stores exabytes of tabular data, and it averages over 15 million requests to tabular data per second. To help you reduce the undifferentiated heavy lifting when managing your tabular data in S3 buckets, we announced Amazon S3 Tables at AWS re:Invent 2024. S3 Tables are the first cloud object store with built-in support for Apache Iceberg. S3 tables are specifically optimized for analytics workloads, resulting in up to threefold faster query throughput and up to tenfold higher transactions per second compared to self-managed tables.

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon S3 Tables integration with Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse  Amazon S3 Tables now integrate with Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse, making it easy for you to access S3 Tables from AWS analytics services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, AWS Glue, and Apache Iceberg–compatible engines such as Apache Spark or PyIceberg. SageMaker Lakehouse enables centralized management of fine-grained data access permissions for S3 Tables and other sources and consistently applies them across all engines.

For those of you who use a third-party catalog, have a custom catalog implementation, or only need basic read and write access to tabular data in a single table bucket, we’ve added new APIs that are compatible with the Iceberg REST Catalog standard. This enables any Iceberg-compatible application to seamlessly create, update, list, and delete tables in an S3 table bucket. For unified data management across all of your tabular data, data governance, and fine-grained access controls, you can also use S3 Tables with SageMaker Lakehouse.

To help you access S3 Tables, we’ve launched updates in the AWS Management Console. You can now create a table, populate it with data, and query it directly from the S3 console using Amazon Athena, making it easier to get started and analyze data in S3 table buckets.

The following screenshot shows how to access Athena directly from the S3 console.

When I select Query tables with Athena or Create table with Athena, it opens the Athena console on the correct data source, catalog, and database.

Since re:Invent 2024, we’ve continued to add new capabilities to S3 Tables at a rapid pace. For example, we added schema definition support to the CreateTable API and you can now create up to 10,000 tables in an S3 table bucket. We also launched S3 Tables into eight additional AWS Regions, with the most recent being Asia Pacific (Seoul, Singapore, Sydney) on March 4, with more to come. You can refer to the S3 Tables AWS Regions page of the documentation to get the list of the eleven Regions where S3 Tables are available today.

Amazon S3 Metadata—announced during re:Invent 2024— has been generally available since January 27. It’s the fastest and easiest way to help you discover and understand your S3 data with automated, effortlessly-queried metadata that updates in near real time. S3 Metadata works with S3 object tags. Tags help you logically group data for a variety of reasons, such as to apply IAM policies to provide fine-grained access, specify tag-based filters to manage object lifecycle rules, and selectively replicate data to another Region. In Regions where S3 Metadata is available, you can capture and query custom metadata that is stored as object tags. To reduce the cost associated with object tags when using S3 Metadata, Amazon S3 reduced pricing for S3 object tagging by 35 percent in all Regions, making it cheaper to use custom metadata.

AWS Pi Day 2025
Over the years, AWS Pi Day has showcased major milestones in cloud storage and data analytics. This year, the AWS Pi Day virtual event will feature a range of topics designed for developers and technical decision-makers, data engineers, AI/ML practitioners, and IT leaders. Key highlights include deep dives, live demos, and expert sessions on all the services and capabilities I discussed in this post.

By attending this event, you’ll learn how you can accelerate your analytics and AI innovation. You’ll learn how you can use S3 Tables with native Apache Iceberg support and S3 Metadata to build scalable data lakes that serve both traditional analytics and emerging AI/ML workloads. You’ll also discover the next generation of Amazon SageMaker, the center for all your data, analytics, and AI, to help your teams collaborate and build faster from a unified studio, using familiar AWS tools with access to all your data whether it’s stored in data lakes, data warehouses, or third-party or federated data sources.

For those looking to stay ahead of the latest cloud trends, AWS Pi Day 2025 is an event you can’t miss. Whether you’re building data lakehouses, training AI models, building generative AI applications, or optimizing analytics workloads, the insights shared will help you maximize the value of your data.

Tune in today and explore the latest in cloud data innovation. Don’t miss the opportunity to engage with AWS experts, partners, and customers shaping the future of data, analytics, and AI.

If you missed the virtual event on March 14, you can visit the event page at any time—we will keep all the content available on-demand there!

— seb

3/18/2025: Added link to Big Data blog.

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At re:Invent 2024, we launched Amazon S3 Tables, the first cloud object store with built-in Apache Iceberg support to streamline storing tabular data at scale, and Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse to simplify analytics and AI with a unified, open, and secure data lakehouse. We also previewed S3 Tables integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) analytics services for you to stream, query, and visualize S3 Tables data using Amazon Athena, Amazon Data Firehose, Amazon EMR, AWS Glue, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon QuickSight.

Our customers wanted to simplify the management and optimization of their Apache Iceberg storage, which led to the development of S3 Tables. They were simultaneously working to break down data silos that impede analytics collaboration and insight generation using the SageMaker Lakehouse. When paired with S3 Tables and SageMaker Lakehouse in addition to built-in integration with AWS analytics services, they can gain a comprehensive platform unifying access to multiple data sources enabling both analytics and machine learning (ML) workflows.

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon S3 Tables integration with Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse to provide unified S3 Tables data access across various analytics engines and tools. You can access SageMaker Lakehouse from Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, a single data and AI development environment that brings together functionality and tools from AWS analytics and AI/ML services. All S3 tables data integrated with SageMaker Lakehouse can be queried from SageMaker Unified Studio and engines such as Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, and Apache Iceberg-compatible engines like Apache Spark or PyIceberg.

With this integration, you can simplify building secure analytic workflows where you can read and write to S3 Tables and join with data in Amazon Redshift data warehouses and third-party and federated data sources, such as Amazon DynamoDB or PostgreSQL.

You can also centrally set up and manage fine-grained access permissions on the data in S3 Tables along with other data in the SageMaker Lakehouse and consistently apply them across all analytics and query engines.

S3 Tables integration with SageMaker Lakehouse in action
To get started, go to the Amazon S3 console and choose Table buckets from the navigation pane and select Enable integration to access table buckets from AWS analytics services.

Now you can create your table bucket to integrate with SageMaker Lakehouse. To learn more, visit Getting started with S3 Tables in the AWS documentation.

1. Create a table with Amazon Athena in the Amazon S3 console
You can create a table, populate it with data, and query it directly from the Amazon S3 console using Amazon Athena with just a few steps. Select a table bucket and select Create table with Athena, or you can select an existing table and select Query table with Athena.

When you want to create a table with Athena, you should first specify a namespace for your table. The namespace in an S3 table bucket is equivalent to a database in AWS Glue, and you use the table namespace as the database in your Athena queries.

Choose a namespace and select Create table with Athena. It goes to the Query editor in the Athena console. You can create a table in your S3 table bucket or query data in the table.

2. Query with SageMaker Lakehouse in the SageMaker Unified Studio
Now you can access unified data across S3 data lakes, Redshift data warehouses, third-party and federated data sources in SageMaker Lakehouse directly from SageMaker Unified Studio.

To get started, go to the SageMaker console and create a SageMaker Unified Studio domain and project using a sample project profile: Data Analytics and AI-ML model development. To learn more, visit Create an Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio domain in the AWS documentation.

After the project is created, navigate to the project overview and scroll down to project details to note down the project role Amazon Resource Name (ARN).

Go to the AWS Lake Formation console and grant permissions for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users and roles. In the in the Principals section, select the <project role ARN> noted in the previous paragraph. Choose Named Data Catalog resources in the LF-Tags or catalog resources section and select the table bucket name you created for Catalogs. To learn more, visit Overview of Lake Formation permissions in the AWS documentation.

When you return to SageMaker Unified Studio, you can see your table bucket project under Lakehouse in the Data menu in the left navigation pane of project page. When you choose Actions, you can select how to query your table bucket data in Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, or JupyterLab Notebook.

When you choose Query with Athena, it automatically goes to Query Editor to run data query language (DQL) and data manipulation language (DML) queries on S3 tables using Athena.

Here is a sample query using Athena:

select * from "s3tablecatalog/s3tables-integblog-bucket”.”proddb"."customer" limit 10;

To query with Amazon Redshift, you should set up Amazon Redshift Serverless compute resources for data query analysis. And then you choose Query with Redshift and run SQL in the Query Editor. If you want to use JupyterLab Notebook, you should create a new JupyterLab space in Amazon EMR Serverless.

3. Join data from other sources with S3 Tables data
With S3 Tables data now available in SageMaker Lakehouse, you can join it with data from data warehouses, online transaction processing (OLTP) sources like relational or non-relational database, Iceberg tables, and other third party sources to gain more comprehensive and deeper insights.

For example, you can add connections to data sources such as Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Google BigQuery, or Snowflake and combine data using SQL without extract, transform, and load (ETL) scripts.

Now you can run the SQL query in the Query editor to join the data in the S3 Tables with the data in the DynamoDB.

Here is a sample query to join between Athena and DynamoDB:

select * from "s3tablescatalog/s3tables-integblog-bucket"."blogdb"."customer", 
              "dynamodb1"."default"."customer_ddb" where cust_id=pid limit 10;

To learn more about this integration, visit Amazon S3 Tables integration with Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse in the AWS documentation.

Now available
S3 Tables integration with SageMaker Lakehouse is now generally available in all AWS Regions where S3 Tables are available. To learn more, visit the S3 Tables product page and the SageMaker Lakehouse page.

Give S3 Tables a try in the SageMaker Unified Studio today and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon S3 and AWS re:Post for Amazon SageMaker or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

In the annual celebration of the launch of Amazon S3, we will introduce more awesome launches for Amazon S3 and Amazon SageMaker. To learn more, join the AWS Pi Day event on March 14.

— Channy

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