This past week, I’ve been deep in the trenches helping customers transform their businesses through AI-DLC (AI-Driven Lifecycle) workshops. Throughout 2026, I’ve had the privilege of facilitating these sessions for numerous customers, guiding them through a structured framework that helps organizations identify, prioritize, and implement AI use cases that deliver measurable business value.

AI-DLC is a methodology that takes companies from AI experimentation to production-ready solutions by aligning technical capabilities with business outcomes. If you’re interested in learning more, check out this blog post that dives deeper into the framework, or watch as Riya Dani teaches me all about AI-DLC on our recent GenAI Developer Hour livestream!

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

OpenAI and Amazon announced a multi-year strategic partnership to accelerate AI innovation for enterprises, startups, and end consumers around the world. Amazon will invest $50 billion in OpenAI, starting with an initial $15 billion investment and followed by another $35 billion in the coming months when certain conditions are met. AWS and OpenAI are co-creating a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI models, available through Amazon Bedrock, which allows developers to keep context, remember prior work, work across software tools and data sources, and access compute.

AWS will serve as the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, enabling organizations to build, deploy, and manage teams of AI agents. OpenAI and AWS are expanding their existing $38 billion multi-year agreement by $100 billion over 8 years, with OpenAI committing to consume approximately 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity, spanning both Trainium3 and next-generation Trainium4 chips.

Last week’s launches

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

• AWS Security Hub Extended offers full-stack enterprise security with curated partner solutions — AWS launched Security Hub Extended, a plan that simplifies procurement, deployment, and integration of full-stack enterprise security solutions including 7AI, Britive, CrowdStrike, Cyera, Island, Noma, Okta, Oligo, Opti, Proofpoint, SailPoint, Splunk, Upwind, and Zscaler. With AWS as the seller of record, customers benefit from pre-negotiated pay-as-you-go pricing, a single bill, no long-term commitments, unified security operations within Security Hub, and unified Level 1 support for AWS Enterprise Support customers.
• Transform live video for mobile audiences with AWS Elemental Inference — AWS launched Elemental Inference, a fully managed AI service that automatically transforms live and on-demand video for mobile and social platforms in real time. The service uses AI-powered cropping to create vertical formats optimized for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, and automatically extracts highlight clips with 6-10 second latency. Beta testing showed large media companies achieved 34% or more savings on AI-powered live video workflows. Deep dive into the Fox Sports implementation.
• MediaConvert introduces new video probe API — AWS Elemental MediaConvert introduced a free Probe API for quick metadata analysis of media files, reading header metadata to return codec specifications, pixel formats, and color space details without processing video content.
• OpenAI-compatible Projects API in Amazon Bedrock — Projects API provides application-level isolation for your generative AI workloads using OpenAI-compatible APIs in the Mantle inference engine in Amazon Bedrock. You can organize and manage your AI applications with improved access control, cost tracking, and observability across your organization.
• Amazon Location Service introduces LLM Context — Amazon Location launched curated AI Agent context as a Kiro power, Claude Code plugin, and agent skill in the open Agent Skills format, improving code accuracy and accelerating feature implementation for location-based capabilities.
• Amazon EKS Node Monitoring Agent is now open source — The Amazon EKS Node Monitoring Agent is now open source on GitHub, allowing visibility into implementation, customization, and community contributions.
• AWS AppConfig integrates with New Relic — AWS AppConfig launched integration with New Relic Workflow Automation for automated, intelligent rollbacks during feature flag deployments, reducing detection-to-remediation time from minutes to seconds.

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:

From AWS community

Here are my personal favorite posts from AWS community:

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS at NVIDIA GTC 2026 — Join us at our AWS sessions, booths, demos, 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 JAWS Days in Tokyo (March 7), Chennai (March 7), Slovakia (March 11), and Pune (March 21).

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

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

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: OpenAI partnership, AWS Elemental Inference, Strands Labs, and more (March 2, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voice of the customer

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

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

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

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

– Veliswa.

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

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of a new capability that integrates AWS Backup logically air-gapped vaults with Multi-party approval to provide access to your backups even when your AWS account is inaccessible due to inadvertent or malicious events. AWS Backup is a fully managed service that centralizes and automates data protection across AWS services and hybrid workloads. It provides core data protection features, ransomware recovery capabilities, and compliance insights and analytics for data protection policies and operations.

As a backup administrator, you use AWS Backup logically air-gapped vaults to securely share backups across accounts and organizations, logically isolate your backup storage, and support direct restore to help reduce recovery time following an inadvertent or malicious event. However, if a bad or unintended actor gains root access to your backup account or the management account of your organization, your backups suddenly become inaccessible, even though they’re still safely stored in the logically air-gapped vault. While traditional account recovery involved working through support channels, AWS Backup with Multi-party approval delivers immediate access to recovery tools, empowering you with faster resolution times and greater control over your recovery timeline.

Multi-party approval for AWS Backup logically air-gapped vaults adds an additional layer of protection for you to recover your application data even when your AWS account becomes completely inaccessible. Using Multi-party approval, you can create approval teams which consist of highly trusted individuals in your organization, then associate them with your logically air-gapped vault. If you get locked out of your AWS accounts due to inadvertent or malicious actions, you can request your own approval team to authorize sharing of your vault from any account, even those outside your AWS Organizations account. Once approved, you gain authorized access to your backups and can begin your recovery process.

How it works
Multi-party approval for AWS Backup logically air-gapped vaults combines the security of logically air-gapped vaults with the governance of Multi-party approval to create a recovery mechanism that works even when your AWS account is compromised. Here’s how it works:

1. Approval team creation
First, you create an approval team in your AWS Organizations management account. If the management account is new, first create an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Identity Center instance before creating the approval team. The approval team consists of trusted individuals (IAM Identity Center users) who will be authorized to approve vault sharing requests. Each approver receives an invitation to join the approval team through a new Approval portal.

2. Vault association
When your approval team is active, you share it with accounts that own logically air-gapped vaults using AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) to safeguard against requests for approval from arbitrary accounts. Backup administrators can then associate this approval team with new or existing logically air-gapped vaults.

3. Protection against compromise
If your AWS account becomes compromised or inaccessible, you can request access to your backups from a different account (a clean recovery account). This request includes the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the logically air-gapped vault in the format arn:aws:backup:<region>:<account>:backup-vault:<name> and an optional vault name and comment.

4. Multi-party approval
The request is sent to the approval team, who review it through the approval portal. When the minimum required number of approvers authorize the request, the vault is automatically shared with the requesting account. All requests and approvals are comprehensively logged in AWS CloudTrail.

5. Recovery process
With access granted, you can immediately start restoring or copying your data in the new recovery account without waiting for your compromised account to be remediated.

This approach provides an entirely separate authentication path to access and recover your backups, completely independent of your AWS account credentials. Even if the bad actor has root access to your account, they can’t prevent the approval team-based recovery process.

1. Create a new logically air-gapped vault
To create a new logically air-gapped vault, provide a name, tags (optional), and vault lock properties.

2. Assign an approval team
When the vault has been created, choose Assign approval team to assign it with an existing approval team.

Choose an existing approval team from the drop-down menu then select Submit to finalize the assignment.

Now your approval team is assigned to your logically air-gapped vault.

Good to know
It’s essential to test your recovery process before an actual emergency:

1. From a different AWS account, use the AWS Backup console or API to request sharing of your logically air-gapped vault by providing the vault ID and ARN.
2. Request approval of your request from the approval team.
3. Once approved, verify that you can access and restore backups from the vault in your testing account.

As a best practice, monitor the health of your approval team regularly using AWS Backup Audit Manager to ensure they have sufficient active participants to meet your approval threshold.

Multi-party approval for enhanced cloud governance
Today, we’re also announcing the general availability of a new capability that AWS account administrators can use to add Multi-party approval to their product offerings. As highlighted in this post, AWS Backup is the first service to integrate this capability. With Multi-party approval, administrators can enable application owners to guard sensitive service operations with a distributed review process.

Good to know
Multi-party approval provides several significant security advantages:

• Distributed decision-making, eliminating single points of failure
• Full auditability through AWS CloudTrail integration
• Protection against compromised credentials
• Formal governance for compliance-sensitive operations
• Consistent approval experience across integrated services

Now available

Multi-party approval is available today in all AWS Regions where AWS Organizations is available. Multi-party approval for AWS Backup logically air-gapped vaults is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Backup is available.

– Veliswa.

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