I have fond memories of the time I built an application live at the AWS GenAI Loft London last September. AWS GenAI Lofts are back in locations such as San Francisco, Berlin, and more, to continue providing collaborative spaces and immersive experiences for startups and developers. Find a loft near you for hands-on access to AI products and services, events, workshops, and networking opportunities, that you can’t miss!

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

Four ways to grant cross-account access in AWS — For some situations, you might want to enable centralized operations across multiple AWS accounts or share resources across teams, or projects within your teams. In these cases, you may be concerned about security, availability, or the manageability of granting this cross-account access. We’ve announced four ways to grant cross-account access in AWS and detail each of the methods and its unique trade-offs.

Amazon ECS adds support for additional IAM condition keys — We’ve launched eight new service-specific condition keys for Identity and Access Management (IAM). These new condition keys let you create IAM policies as well as srvice control policies (SCPs) to better enforce your organizational policies in containerized environments. You can use IAM condition keys to author policies that enforce access control based on API request context.

AWS Chatbot is now named Amazon Q Developer — AWS Chatbot has been renamed to Amazon Q Developer, representing an enhancement to developer productivity through generative AI-powered capabilities. Furthermore, this update is an enhancement of our chat-based DevOps capabilities. By combining the proven functionality of AWS Chatbot with the generative AI capabilities of Amazon Q, we’re providing developers with more intuitive, efficient tools for cloud resource management.

Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet hybrid reasoning model is now available in Amazon Bedrock — We’re expanding the foundation models (FM) offerings of Amazon Bedrock and we’ve announced the availability of Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet FM in Amazon Bedrock. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is Anthropic’s most intelligent model to date. It stands out as their first hybrid reasoning model capable of producing quick responses or extended thinking, meaning it can work through difficult problems using careful, step-by-step reasoning.

Other AWS news
JAWS-UG (Japan AWS User Group) is the largest AWS user group in the world, and holds JAWS Days every year with over a thousand participants from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The March 1st event started with a keynote speech on next-generation development by Jeff Barr (VP of AWS Evangelism), and included over 100 technical and community experience sessions, lightning talks, and workshops such as Game Days, Builders Card Challenges, and networking parties. If you want to experience the most active AWS community event in the world, I recommend attending next year.

Amazon Q Developer now generally available in Amazon SageMaker Canvas — Announced as available in preview at AWS reinvent 2024, Amazon Q Developer is now generally available in Amazon SageMaker Canvas to help you build machine learning (ML) models using natural language.

Applications for the 2025 AWS Cloud Club Captains Program are still open through March 6th. AWS Cloud Clubs are student-led groups for post-secondary and independent students, 18 years old and over. Find a club near you on the Meetup page.

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

DevSecOps on AWS: Secure, Automate, and Have a Laugh Along the Way – Discover how DevSecOps on AWS transforms your development pipeline by integrating security from the very first commit to production deployment, by Ahmed Mohamed.

Find out how to earn 100 percent free AWS certification vouchers in Opportunity to earn free AWS Certification Vouchers, published by Anand Joshi.

In the post, Boost SaaS Onboarding & Retention with AWS AI & Automation, Kaumudi Tiwari details how to navigate endless forms, generic guides, and a cluttered interface when signing up for a new software as a service (SaaS) platform.

My colleague Dennis Traub has published helpful step-by-step guides on how to use reasoning capabilities with Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet in your C#/.NET, Java, JavaScript, or Python applications. Find these posts and much more generative AI-related content in the Gen AI Space on community.aws.

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. Available in multiple geographic regions: APJC and EMEA (March 6), North America (March 13), Greater China Region (March 14), and Latin America (April 8).

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: Paris (April 9), Amsterdam (April 16), London (April 30), and Poland (May 5).

AWS re:Inforce – AWS re:Inforce (June 16–18) in Philadelphia, PA, is our annual learning event devoted to all things AWS Cloud security. 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.

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.

AWS Training and Certification hosts free training events, both online and in-person, that help you get the most out of the AWS Cloud. Register to gain foundational cloud knowledge or dive deep in a technical area. Join AWS experts for training events that meet your goals, such as AWS Discovery Days, in-person. and virtual events at AWS Skills Centers including the one in Cape Town.

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events here.

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

– Veliswa

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 Roundup: Anthropic Claude 3.7, JAWS Days, cross-account access, and more (March 3, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

As winter maintains its hold over where I live in the Netherlands, rare moments of sunlight become precious gifts. This weekend offered one such treasure—while cycling along a quiet canal, golden rays broke through the typically gray Dutch sky, creating a perfect moment of serenity. These glimpses of brightness feel particularly special during January, when daylight can be scarce in our corner of Europe. As we move deeper into 2025, the third week of the new year brings both reflection and forward momentum. While global conversations swirl around technological advancements, it’s these small, personal moments that remind us to pause and appreciate the simple pleasures among our rapidly evolving world.

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

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

AWS Mexico (Central) Region – In February 2024, we announced plans to expand infrastructure in Mexico, and we’ve now launched the AWS Mexico (Central) Region with three Availability Zones and API code mx-central-1. This marks the first AWS infrastructure Region in Mexico and adds to our growing presence in Latin America. The new Region provides you with local workload management, data storage capabilities, enhanced performance with lower latency, and robust security standards. It features advanced cloud technologies, including cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities with purpose-built processors, comprehensive security capabilities with support for 143 security standards and compliance certifications. With this launch, AWS now spans 114 Availability Zones within 36 geographic Regions.

AWS Management Console now supports simultaneous sign-in for multiple AWS accounts – Using multi-session capability in the AWS Management Console, you can now sign-in to multiple AWS accounts and manage your resources in a single browser. You can sign in to up to 5 sessions and this can be any combination of root, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), or federated roles in different accounts or in the same account. You can scale your applications using multiple accounts following AWS best-practice guidelines. You can use accounts for different environments, such as development, testing, and production, and compare resource configurations and status across multiple accounts for troubleshooting application issues and other application related jobs.

Introducing new larger sizes on Amazon EC2 Flex instances – We’re announcing the general availability of two new larger sizes (12xlarge and 16xlarge) on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Flex (C7i-flex and M7i-flex) instances. The new sizes expand the EC2 Flex portfolio, providing additional compute options to scale up existing workloads or run larger-sized applications that need additional memory. These instances are powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, which are available only on AWS, and offer up to 15% better performance over comparable x86-based Intel processors used by other cloud providers. Flex instances are the easiest way to get price performance benefits and lower prices for a majority of compute-intensive and general-purpose workloads. They deliver up to 19% better price performance than comparable previous generation instances and are a great first choice for applications that don’t fully utilize the compute resources. Flex instances are ideal for web and application servers, batch processing, enterprise applications, databases, and more. For compute-intensive and general-purpose workloads that need even larger instance sizes (up to 192 vCPUs and 768 GiB memory) or continuous high CPU usage, you can use Amazon EC2 C7i and M7i instances.

Announcing AWS User Notifications general availability on AWS CloudFormation – You can use AWS User Notifications to configure notifications to be sent using the AWS Management Console Notifications Center, email, AWS Chatbot, or mobile push notifications to the AWS Console Mobile App to keep you informed about important events such as Amazon CloudWatch alarms. With this capability, you can define notification configurations as part of your infrastructure-as-code (IaC) practices and specify notification configurations for specific resource types within your AWS CloudFormation templates. For example, you can set up notifications to trigger when an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group scales out, an Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) load balancer is provisioned, or an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) database is modified. You have granular control over which events will trigger notifications and who should receive them.

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

We launched existing services and instance types in additional Regions:

• Amazon EC2 M8g instances are now available in AWS Europe (Stockholm) – These instances offer larger instance sizes with up to three times more vCPUs and memory compared to Graviton3 based Amazon M7g instances. AWS Graviton4 processors are up to 40% faster for databases, 30% faster for web applications, and 45% faster for large Java applications than AWS Graviton3 processors.
• AWS announces new AWS Direct Connect location and expansion in Querétaro, Mexico – The Direct Connect service helps you establish a private, physical network connection between AWS and your data center, office, or colocation environment. These private connections can provide a more consistent network experience than those made over the public internet.
• Amazon EC2 C7i-flex instances are now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region – These instances expand the EC2 Flex instances portfolio to provide the easiest way for you to get price performance benefits for a majority of compute intensive workloads.
• AWS Backup now supports organization-wide reports in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions – You can use AWS Backup Audit Manager to generate aggregated cross-account and cross-Region reports on your data protection policies and retrieve operational data about your backup and recovery activities.
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now available in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region – OpenSearch Serverless is a serverless deployment option for Amazon OpenSearch Service that makes it simple to run search and analytics workloads without the complexities of infrastructure management.
• AWS Backup is now available in Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region – Using AWS Backup, you can centrally create and manage backups of your application data, protect your data from inadvertent or malicious actions with immutable recovery points and vaults, and restore your data in the event of a data loss incident.
• Amazon GuardDuty is now available in Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region – You can now use this additional Region to continually monitor and detect anomalous behavior, security threats, and sophisticated multistage attack sequences targeting your AWS accounts to help protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data.
• Amazon EC2 R8g instances are now available in additional Regions – Amazon EC2 R8g instances are ideal for memory-intensive workloads such as databases, in-memory caches, and real-time big data analytics.
• Amazon EC2 I8g instances are now available in Europe (Frankfurt) Region – I8g instances offer the best performance in Amazon EC2 for storage-intensive workloads.
• Amazon S3 Tables are now available in five additional AWS Regions – Amazon S3 Tables deliver the first cloud object store with built-in Apache Iceberg support and the easiest way to store tabular data at scale. S3 Tables are specifically optimized for analytics workloads, resulting in up to three times faster query performance through continual table optimization compared to unmanaged Iceberg tables, and up to ten times higher transactions per second compared to Iceberg tables stored in general purpose S3 buckets.

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

AWS Summits are free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Stay updated by visiting the official AWS Summit website and sign up for notifications to learn when registration opens for events in your area.

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!

— 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: New AWS Mexico (Central) Region, simultaneous sign-in for multiple AWS accounts, and more (January 20, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

As we move into the second week of 2025, China is celebrating Laba Festival (腊八节), a traditional holiday, which marks the beginning of Chinese New Year preparations. On this day, Chinese people prepare Laba congee, a special porridge combining various grains, dried fruits, and nuts. This

nutritious mixture symbolizes harmony, prosperity, and good fortune — with each ingredient representing the diversity and abundance of life. This traditional practice dates back to when Buddha achieved enlightenment after consuming rice porridge, making it a symbol of both material and spiritual nourishment. The festival, occurring on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, marks the countdown to Spring Festival, China’s most significant traditional holiday celebrating family reunion and renewal.

As our global tech community grows, such cultural celebrations remind us of the importance of inclusive innovation and shared progress.

Last week’s launches

Let’s take a look at what Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched in this week.

New AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region– AWS has expanded its global infrastructure with the launch of the new Asia Pacific (Thailand) AWS Region, featuring three Availability Zones. With this addition, customers in Thailand and throughout Southeast Asia can serve customers with reduced latency while maintaining data residency within Thailand. The newly launched Region supports the complete range of AWS services and strengthens our presence in the rapidly growing ASEAN market.

New AWS Direct Connect location in Bangkok – Following the launch of our Thailand Region, we’ve established a new AWS Direct Connect location in Bangkok and expanded our existing infrastructure. This addition provides customers in Thailand with improved connectivity options and reduced network latency when accessing AWS services.

Database and analytics

Configurable point-in-time recovery periods for Amazon DynamoDB – Amazon DynamoDB now enables customizable point-in-time recovery (PITR) periods, which means customers can specify recovery durations ranging from 1 to 35 days on a per-table basis. This enhancement enables organizations to meet precise compliance requirements while maximizing cost-efficiency. The feature is now available across all AWS Regions, including AWS GovCloud (US West) and China Regions. This flexibility in data recovery periods empowers customers to align their backup policies precisely with their business requirements and regulatory obligations.

Amazon MSK Connect APIs with AWS PrivateLink – Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka Connect (Amazon MSK Connect) APIs now support AWS PrivateLink, giving customers access to MSK Connect APIs through private endpoints within their virtual private cloud (VPC). This enhancement provides increased security and reduced data exposure by keeping traffic within the AWS network.

Generative AI and machine learning

Amazon Q Developer in SageMaker Code Editor– Amazon Q Developer is now integrated into the Amazon SageMaker Code Editor integrated development environment (IDE), enhancing the developer’s experience with AI-powered code assistance. Intelligent code suggestions, documentation assistance, and contextual recommendations are now directly available within the SageMaker development environment.

Management and governance

AWS Systems Manager Automation in AWS Chatbot – AWS Chatbot now offers 20 additional AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook recommendations, expanding its capabilities for automated operations management. These new recommendations help customers streamline their operational tasks and implement best practices more efficiently through chat-based interactions.

AWS Transit Gateway cost analysis enhancement – We’ve introduced new capabilities for analyzing Transit Gateway data processing charges using cost allocation tags. This feature provides improved visibility and control over networking costs, enabling organizations to track and optimize AWS Transit Gateway usage efficiently. The enhanced cost analysis tools deliver detailed insights into network traffic patterns and associated costs.

Other AWS news and highlights

2024’s most popular DevOps blog posts – The retrospective blog post “The most visited DevOps and Developer Productivity blog posts in 2024” has reached the top one position on this week’s AWS most popular articles chart. This compilation presents the most influential DevOps content from 2024, offering insights into trending topics and best practices. The collection examines key developments in continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD), infrastructure as code (IaC), and automation practices.

New security course for generative AI – AWS Skill Builder has released a new course focusing on securing generative AI applications on AWS. This comprehensive training teaches professionals to implement security best practices for artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) workloads, addressing data protection, model security, and compliance requirements. The course meets the growing demand for specialized security knowledge in the rapidly evolving field of generative AI.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens free trials – We’re introducing free trials for first-time users of Amazon Connect Contact Lens conversational analytics and performance evaluations. New customers can process up to 100,000 voice minutes monthly at no cost for 2 months, and first-time performance evaluation users receive a 30-day free trial starting with their first evaluation. With this initiative, customers can experience Contact Lens capabilities in their environment without additional costs. The free trials are available across all AWS Regions where Contact Lens is supported.

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

Whether you’re a developer, architect, business leader, or you’re starting your cloud journey – and regardless of what 2024 brought your way – 2025 presents new opportunities for everyone.

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

– Betty

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: New Asia Pacific Region, DynamoDB updates, Amazon Q developer, and more (January 13, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.