Today, we’re announcing the public preview of AWS Well-Architected Agent, an AI-powered service that analyzes your AWS environment to deliver targeted, contextual recommendations for improving your applications’ cost, security, performance, and resilience. The AWS Well-Architected Agent analyzes your infrastructure, understands unique business goals, and delivers contextual recommendations with ready-to-implement fixes. It delivers context-aware optimization without relying on manual audits or generic checklists.

The agent evaluates your environment as an experienced cloud architect would. It automatically correlates utilization metrics, resource configurations, and application topology, and analyzes against Well-Architected best practices across 65+ AWS services. It generates recommendations aligned to your declared business goals, delivers implementation packages with every finding, and surfaces cross-pillar trade-offs making it simpler to remediate the findings.

Here are the three main features of this service:

• Goal-aligned intelligence: AWS Well-Architected Agent replaces flat, undifferentiated findings with context-aware, prioritized recommendations. You declare your business objectives and share your application context. The agent automatically generates and prioritizes recommendations by impact and effort against those goals.
• Three-level recommendations: AWS Well-Architected Agent provides individual resource findings with specific dollar impact (where applicable) and step-by-step remediation, consolidated findings across multiple resources scoped to your application, and broad architectural patterns and designs with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) code changes needed to align with Well-Architected best practices.
• Optionality in remediation: You can choose your path on how you want to remediate with a complete implementation steps tailored to your environment: the console walk-throughs, updated IaC changes for architecture-level recommendations, and AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) commands.

AWS Well-Architected Agent in action
To get started, create an agent profile to define the scope of what Well-Architected Agent can access and provide recommendations on, complete the IAM role setup to access resources, conduct architecture review, and remediate recommendations.

Create an agent profile
In the AWS Well-Architected console, choose Get started with Well-Architected Agent. You can define an agent profile that specifies which AWS accounts and applications to monitor, which optimization pillars to focus on, and the permissions required.

You can choose AWS accounts or AWS Regions to monitor and optimization pillars that matter most to your business. You can also set goals for each pillar: cost optimization, performance, resilience, and security.

To give access to the agent for your AWS environment, provision customer-managed IAM roles the agent uses to read resource configurations, utilization metrics, and application topology. To learn more, visit the IAM prerequisite for AWS Well-Architected Agent.

When you choose Get Started, the agent creates your agent profile. Resource and application recommendations will be generated within 24 hours after profile creation.

You can conduct an architecture review on pre-deployment workloads by uploading an IaC project in Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) to be analyzed. Choose Conduct architecture review in the dashboard, upload a.zip file containing IaC project or repository file, and select which Well-Architected lens to use for reviewing your infrastructure.

You can define your applications to add context which will enhance the relevancy and further contextualize recommendations. Choose Add application context in the dashboard, add your applications with AWS accounts, AWS Regions, AWS services, tags if you want to narrow the scope to specific resources, and the details of applications.

Review prioritized recommendations and start remediating
Now you can see generated prioritized recommendations generated by the agent across your resources and applications, selected pillars, ranked against your declared goals, with automation-ready remediation included.

When you choose the specific recommendation, you can see the details, insights into why the agent are suggesting the recommendation, impacts and trade-off, and recommended fixes across affected AWS resources.

Choose Start remediation to address recommended fixes. You can choose the console, updated IaC template, CLI commands to remediate by the resolution type. It provides detailed step-by-step instructions and you can roll out this instruction and verify the result.

When you choose Using updated IaC template, the agent provides the code changes needed to update your existing IaC templates such as the CDK function shown above which you can copy directly into your codebase.

You can also configure API access to integrate recommendations directly into your existing development and operations workflows. To interact with the agent programmatically, including calling APIs and searching documentation, try the AWS MCP Server and plugins with your preferred AI coding tool. To learn more, visit the AWS Well-Architected Agent documentation.

Things to know
Here are some things that you should know about the Well-Architected Agent.

• Automation: You can receive recommendations with the exact IaC code changes needed to remediate, with risks identified by pillar, catching issues before they reach production. Recommendations are delivered through the console and API so you can act without context-switching. Recommendations are also updated periodically, so new recommendations are available for your team to track regularly.
• Evaluation: Generative AI capabilities produce this recommendation, which may contain errors or incomplete information. You are responsible for evaluating the recommendation in your specific context and implementing appropriate oversight and safeguards. Learn more about AWS Responsible AI practices.

You can still use existing AWS Well-Architected Tool to manually evaluate your cloud architecture with user-defined lenses that measure your workload using your own best practices.

Join the preview
Access to the AWS Well-Architected Agent and its recommendations is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon). You can onboard workloads from any AWS commercial Region. AWS Well-Architected Agent is delivered by AWS Support and available to AWS customers with an AWS Support plan.

Give it a try today in the AWS Well-Architected console and send feedback through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

The post Announcing AWS Well-Architected Agent, an AI-powered intelligence to optimize your cloud environment (preview) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, we’re announcing AWS CloudFormation Express mode, a new deployment mode that accelerates deployments for developers and AI tools iterating on infrastructure. Express mode accelerates deployments by completing when CloudFormation confirms resource configuration is applied, rather than waiting for extended stabilization checks. This reduces deployment time by up to 4 times for iterative development workflows and production scenarios.

How it works

Every CloudFormation deployment performs stabilization checks after resource configuration is applied. These checks serve an important purpose when you need to confirm resources can serve traffic before shifting load.

However, many workflows do not require full stabilization to proceed. Express mode benefits two primary use cases: iterative development workflows and production scenarios where you are comfortable with eventual stabilization. These use cases include iterating on infrastructure configurations during development, testing individual components of your application, and AI-assisted infrastructure development that benefits from sub-minute feedback loops.

With Express mode, CloudFormation completes deployments when resource configuration is applied, without waiting for stabilization checks. Resources continue becoming operational in the background. CloudFormation automatically retries dependent resources that encounter transient failures during provisioning within the same stack, without requiring any customer intervention. This built-in resilience handles timing issues between resources as they stabilize. Express mode changes when the deployment completes, not how resources are provisioned.

For example, when I create an Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queue with a dead letter queue (DLQ), Standard mode takes 64 seconds, but Express mode completes in up to 10 seconds. In the case of deleting an AWS Lambda function with network interface attachment, Standard mode takes 20–30 minutes, but Express mode completes in up to 10 seconds based on my benchmarking test.

Get started with CloudFormation Express mode

When you create a CloudFormation stack in the AWS Management Console, choose Enable in the Express mode under Stack deployment options.

You can also use AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS SDKs, or IaC tools like AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), and AI tools such as Kiro.

Activate Express mode by setting the --deployment-config parameter to EXPRESS when creating, updating, or deleting stacks. No template changes are required. Express mode disables rollback by default for the fastest iteration experience. To re-enable rollback, set disableRollback to false in the deployment-config for production environments, or implement monitoring/cleanup mechanisms for failed deployments.

aws cloudformation create-stack  
   --stack-name my-app  
   --template-body file://template.yaml  
   --deployment-config '{"mode": "EXPRESS", "disableRollback": true}' 

For example, use the Express mode when you build infrastructure incrementally, adding resources one at a time. Ensure your IAM role templates follow the principle of least privilege.

# Iteration 1: Deploy IAM role
aws cloudformation create-stack 
--stack-name my-microservice 
--template-body file://iteration1-iam.yaml 
--deployment-config '{"mode": "EXPRESS"}' 
--capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM
--role-arn arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/CloudFormationDeployRole

# Iteration 2: Add Lambda function
aws cloudformation update-stack 
--stack-name my-microservice 
--template-body file://iteration2-lambda.yaml 
--deployment-config '{"mode": "EXPRESS"}' 
--capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM
--role-arn arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/CloudFormationDeployRole

# Iteration 3: Add SQS queue and event source mapping
aws cloudformation update-stack 
--stack-name my-microservice 
--template-body file://iteration3-sqs.yaml 
--deployment-config '{"mode": "EXPRESS"}' 
--capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM
--role-arn arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/CloudFormationDeployRole

For AWS CDK, activate Express mode with the cdk deploy --express command when you deploy your CDK stack. This command retrieves your generated CloudFormation template and deploys it through the CloudFormation Express mode, which provisions your resources as part of a CloudFormation stack.

Express mode works with all existing CloudFormation templates and supports all CloudFormation features including change sets and nested stacks. When you enable Express mode on a parent stack, all nested stacks also use Express mode. If you need resources to be fully operational before proceeding with traffic or testing, continue using the default deployment behavior, which performs stabilization checks before completing.

Now available

AWS CloudFormation Express mode is available today in all AWS commercial Regions at no additional cost. For Regional availability and a future roadmap, visit the AWS Capabilities by Region. If you want to call APIs, search documentation, find regional availability, and check troubleshooting about this new feature, try using the AWS MCP Server and plugins with your preferred AI tool. To learn more, visit the CloudFormation documentation.

Start accelerating your deployments today, and send feedback to AWS re:Post for AWS CloudFormation or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

The post Accelerate your infrastructure deployments by up to 4x with AWS CloudFormation Express mode appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

I have been building with AI agents and MCP tools for a while now, and one question kept coming up: how do you give an agent real, authenticated access to AWS without handing it the keys to the kingdom? Today, there is an answer.

I’m happy to announce the general availability of the AWS MCP Server, a managed remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives AI agents and coding assistants secure, authenticated access to all AWS services through a small, fixed set of tools.

The AWS MCP Server is part of the Agent Toolkit for AWS, a suite of tooling that includes the MCP Server, skills, and plugins that help coding agents build more effectively and efficiently on AWS.

AI coding agents are already useful for many tasks, but they run into real trouble when working with AWS at any meaningful depth. Without access to current AWS documentation, agents rely on training data that may be months out of date and may not know about services like Amazon S3 Vectors, Amazon Aurora DSQL, or Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. When asked to build infrastructure, they tend to reach for the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) rather than AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) or AWS CloudFormation, and they produce AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies that are far broader than necessary. The result is infrastructure that works in a demo but is not production-ready.

The AWS MCP Server addresses this through a compact set of tools that do not consume your model’s context window. The call_aws tool executes any of the 15,000+ AWS API operations using your existing IAM credentials. When we will launch new APIs, they will be supported within days. The search_documentation and read_documentation tools retrieve current AWS documentation and best practices at query time, so the agent always works from up-to-date information.

With general availability, we are introducing several new capabilities. The AWS MCP Server now supports IAM context keys, so you no longer need a separate IAM permission to use the server and can express fine-grained access in a standard IAM policy. Documentation retrieval no longer requires authentication. We have also reduced the number of tokens required per interaction, which matters for complex, multi-step workflows.

Also new, the run_script tool lets the agent write a short Python script that runs server-side in a sandboxed environment. The sandbox inherits your IAM permissions but has no network access, so you can give an agent the ability to process data without giving it access to your local file system or a shell. When an agent needs to call multiple APIs and combine the results, making them one at a time is slow and burns context. With run_script, the agent chains API calls, filters responses, and computes results in a single round-trip, which is both faster and more context-efficient.

The most significant addition is the transition from Agent SOPs to Skills. Skills provide curated guidance and best practices for the tasks where agents most commonly make mistakes. This helps agents complete work faster, using validated best practices, with fewer errors and fewer tokens — all of which saves you time and money. Skills are contributed and maintained by AWS service teams. This keeps the tool list short and predictable, which reduces hallucination and keeps the agent focused.

For enterprise customers, the AWS MCP Server provides a clear separation between human and agent permissions. You can use IAM policies or Service Control Policies to specify that a given user can perform mutating operations while the MCP server is restricted to read-only actions. Amazon CloudWatch metrics published under the AWS-MCP namespace let you observe MCP server calls separately from direct human calls, giving you the audit trail that compliance teams require. Amazon CloudTrail captures all API calls for a complete record.

Let’s see it in action

For this demo, I chose to use Claude Code, but I can use the AWS MCP Server with any AI agent that supports MCP, which is basically all tools available today: Kiro CLI, Kiro, Cursor, Codex, and more. I configure Claude Code to use the Anthropic Opus 4.6 model.

Opus 4.6 has a knowledge cutoff date in May 2025. It means it doesn’t know anything that happened after May last year. I ask a question about an AWS service that was introduced recently: Amazon S3 Vectors, launched in preview in July 2025 and that went GA in December 2025.

The question is “how to store embedding on S3″. (embedding is a kind of vector)

It gives me five solutions, all correct, but none using S3 Vectors as I asked. Note that this answer comes from the Opus 4.6 model, not from Claude Code. Any AI tool using the same model will return similar answers because S3 Vectors wasn’t announced at the time the model was trained.

Let’s now try with the AWS MCP Server.

The AWS MCP Server uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and IAM SigV4 authentication. To use my local AWS credentials configuration over MCP, which only supports OAuth 2.1, I configure my AI coding agent to call the AWS MCP Server through a proxy. The MCP Proxy for AWS is an open source proxy that runs on my machine and bridges the world of IAM authentication to OAuth.

I add the MCP configuration with this command:

claude mcp add-json aws-mcp --scope user 
   '{"command":"uvx","args":["mcp-proxy-for-aws@latest","https://aws-mcp.us-east-1.api.aws/mcp","--metadata","AWS_REGION=us-west-2"]}'

You’ll have to have uv installed before you can use the AWS MCP server. On Linux or Mac, you can run: curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Let’s analyze the JSON configuration:

• I use the user scope to make the server available to all my projects on my laptop.
• uvx mcp-proxy-for-aws is the command to launch the proxy; the rest of the arguments are parameters passed to the proxy.
• https://aws-mcp.us-east-1.api.aws/mcp is one of the two regional endpoints for the AWS MCP Server. The proxy will forward Claude Code’s requests to that endpoint.
• --metadata are passed to the proxy target. Here, it tells the AWS MCP Server to use the US West (Oregon) Region.

I start Claude Code and I type /mcp to verify the AWS MCP Server is correctly installed and can use my credentials.

I ask the same question: “how can I store embedding on S3”.

This time, Claude Code knows it has a tool it can use to answer the question. It asks me permission to invoke the aws___search_documentation tool. After a few seconds, I receive a correct answer: “AWS now has a dedicated service for this: Amazon S3 Vectors …”

Pricing and availability

The AWS MCP Server is available today in the US East (N. Virginia) and Europe (Frankfurt) AWS Regions and can make API calls to any Region. There is no additional charge for the AWS MCP server itself. You pay only for the AWS resources you create and any applicable data transfer costs.

The AWS MCP Server works with Claude Code, Kiro, Cursor, and any MCP-compatible client. To get started, see the AWS MCP Server User Guide.

I have been waiting for something like this since I started using MCP tools in my AI agents early last year. The combination of current documentation, authenticated API access, and sandboxed script execution in a single server changes what an agent can actually do on AWS. I am curious what you build with it. Let me know in the comments.

— seb

Updated on May 6th – Added uv installation script.

The post The AWS MCP Server is now generally available appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Over the past week, we passed Laba festival, a traditional marker in the Chinese calendar that signals the final stretch leading up to the Lunar New Year. For many in China, it’s a moment associated with reflection and preparation, wrapping up what the year has carried, and turning attention toward what lies ahead.

Looking forward, next week also brings Lichun, the beginning of spring and the first of the 24 solar terms. In Chinese tradition, spring is often seen as the season when growth begins and new cycles take shape. There’s a common saying that “a year’s plans begin in spring,” capturing the idea that this is a time to set one’s direction and start fresh.

Last week’s launches

Here are the launches that got my attention this week:

• Amazon Bedrock enhances support for agent workflows with server-side tools and extended prompt caching – Amazon Bedrock introduced two updates that improve how developers build and operate AI agents. The Responses API now supports server-side tool use, so agents can perform actions such as web search, code execution, and database updates within AWS security boundaries. Bedrock also adds a 1-hour time-to-live (TTL) option for prompt caching, which helps improve performance and reduce the cost for long-running, multi-turn agent workflows. Server-side tools are available with OpenAI GPT OSS 20B and 120B models, and the 1-hour prompt caching TTL is generally available for select Claude models by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock.
• Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio adds private VPC connectivity with AWS PrivateLink – Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now supports AWS PrivateLink, providing private connectivity between your VPC and SageMaker Unified Studio without routing customer data over the public internet. With SageMaker service endpoints onboarded into a VPC, data traffic remains within the AWS network and is governed by IAM policies, supporting stricter security and compliance requirements.
• Amazon S3 adds support for changing object encryption without data movement – Amazon S3 now supports changing the server-side encryption type of existing encrypted objects without moving or re-uploading data. Using the UpdateObjectEncryption API, you can switch from SSE-S3 to SSE-KMS, rotate customer -managed AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys, or standardize encryption across buckets at scale with S3 Batch Operations while preserving object properties and lifecycle eligibility.
• Amazon Keyspaces introduces table pre-warming for predictable high-throughput workloads – Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) now supports table pre-warming, which helps you proactively set warm throughput levels so tables can handle high read and write traffic instantly without cold-start delays. Pre-warming helps reduce throttling during sudden traffic spikes, such as product launches or sales events, and works with both on-demand and provisioned capacity modes, including multi-Region tables. The feature supports consistent, low-latency performance while giving you more control over throughput readiness.
• Amazon DynamoDB MRSC global tables integrate with AWS Fault Injection Service – Amazon DynamoDB multi-Region strong consistency (MRSC) global tables now integrate with AWS Fault Injection Service. With this integration, you can simulate Regional failures, test replication behavior, and validate application resiliency for strongly consistent, multi-Region workloads.

Additional updates

Here are some additional projects, blog posts, and news items that I found interesting:

• Building zero-trust access across multi-account AWS environments with AWS Verified Access – This post walks through how to implement AWS Verified Access in a centralized, shared-services architecture. It shows how to integrate with AWS IAM Identity Center and AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) to apply zero trust access controls at the application layer and reduce operational overhead across multi-account AWS environments.
• Amazon EventBridge increases event payload size to 1 MB – Amazon EventBridge now supports event payloads up to 1 MB, an increase from the previous 256 KB limit. This update helps event-driven architectures carry richer context in a single event, including complex JSON structures, telemetry data, and machine learning (ML) or generative AI outputs, without splitting payloads or relying on external storage.
• AWS MCP Server adds deployment agent SOPs (preview) – AWS introduced deployment standard operating procedures (SOPs) that AI agents can deploy web applications to AWS from a single natural language prompt in MCP -compatible integrated development environments (IDEs) and command line interfaces (CLIs) such as Kiro, Cursor, and Claude Code. The agent generates AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) infrastructure, deploys AWS CloudFormation stacks, and sets up continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows following AWS best practices. The preview supports frameworks including React, Vue.js, Angular, and Next.js.
• AWS Network Firewall adds generation AI traffic visibility with web category filtering – AWS Network Firewall now provides visibility into generative AI application traffic through predefined web categories. You can use these categories directly in firewall rules to govern access to generative AI tools and other web services. When combined with TLS inspection, category-based filtering can be applied at the full URL level.
• AWS Lambda adds enhanced observability for Kafka event source mappings – AWS Lambda introduced enhanced observability for Kafka event source mappings, providing Amazon CloudWatch Logs and metrics to monitor event polling configuration, scaling behavior, and event processing state. The update improves visibility into Kafka-based Lambda workloads, helping teams diagnose configuration issues, permission errors, and function failures more efficiently. The capability supports both Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) and self-managed Apache Kafka event sources.
• AWS CloudFormation 2025 year in review – This year-in-review post highlights CloudFormation updates delivered throughout 2025, with a focus on early validation, safer deployments, and improved developer workflows. It covers enhancements such as improved troubleshooting, drift-aware change sets, stack refactoring, StackSets updates, and new -IDE and AI -assisted tooling, including the CloudFormation language server and the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) MCP server.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendars so that you can sign up for this upcoming event:

AWS Community Day Romania (April 23–24, 2026) – This community-led AWS event brings together developers, architects, entrepreneurs, and students for more than 10 professional sessions delivered by AWS Heroes, Solutions Architects, and industry experts. Attendees can expect expert-led technical talks, insights from speakers with global conference experience, and opportunities to connect during dedicated networking breaks, all hosted at a premium venue designed to support collaboration and community engagement.

If you’re looking for more ways to stay connected beyond this event, join the AWS Builder Center to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community.

Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup.

–betty

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Bedrock agent workflows, Amazon SageMaker private connectivity, and more (February 2, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, we’re announcing Amazon Route 53 Accelerated recovery for managing public DNS records, a new Domain Name Service (DNS) business continuity feature that is designed to provide a 60-minute recovery time objective (RTO) during service disruptions in the US East (N. Virginia) AWS Region. This enhancement ensures that customers can continue making DNS changes and provisioning infrastructure even during regional outages, providing greater predictability and resilience for mission-critical applications.

Customers running applications that require business continuity have told us they need additional DNS resilience capabilities to meet their business continuity requirements and regulatory compliance obligations. While AWS maintains exceptional availability across our global infrastructure, organizations in regulated industries like banking, FinTech, and SaaS want the confidence that they will be able to make DNS changes even during unexpected regional disruptions, allowing them to quickly provision standby cloud resources or redirect traffic when needed.

Accelerated recovery for managing public DNS records addresses this need by targeting DNS changes that customers can make within 60 minutes of a service disruption in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. The feature works seamlessly with your existing Route 53 setup, providing access to key Route 53 API operations during failover scenarios, including ChangeResourceRecordSets, GetChange, ListHostedZones, and ListResourceRecordSets. Customers can continue using their existing Route 53 API endpoint without modifying applications or scripts.

Let’s try it out

Configuring a Route53 hosted zone to use accelerated recovery is simple. Here I am creating a new hosted zone for a new website I’m building.

Once I have created my hosted zone, I see a new tab labeled Accelerated recovery. I can see here that accelerated recovery is disabled by default.

To enable it, I just need to click the Enable button and confirm my choice in the modal that appears as depicted in the dialog below.

Enabling accelerated recovery will take a couple minutes to complete. Once it’s enabled, I see a green Enabled status as depicted in the screenshot below.

I can disable accelerated recovery at any time from this same area of the AWS Management Console. I can also enable accelerated recovery for any existing hosted zones I have already created.

Enhanced DNS business continuity

With accelerated recovery enabled, customers gain several key capabilities during service disruptions. The feature maintains access to essential Route 53 API operations, ensuring that DNS management remains available when it’s needed most. Organizations can continue to make critical DNS changes, provision new infrastructure, and redirect traffic flows without waiting for full service restoration.

The implementation is designed for simplicity and reliability. Customers don’t need to learn new APIs or modify existing automation scripts. The same Route 53 endpoints and API calls continue to work, providing a seamless experience during both normal operations and failover scenarios.

Now available

Accelerated recovery for Amazon Route 53 public hosted zones is available now. You can enable this feature through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS Software Development Kit (AWS SDKs), or infrastructure as code tools like AWS CloudFormation and AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK). There is no additional cost for using accelerated recovery.

To learn more about accelerated recovery and get started, visit the documentation. This new capability represents our continued commitment to providing customers with the DNS resilience they need to build and operate mission-critical applications in the cloud.

The post Amazon Route 53 launches Accelerated recovery for managing public DNS records appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Deploying containerized applications to production requires navigating hundreds of configuration parameters across load balancers, auto scaling policies, networking, and security groups. This overhead delays time to market and diverts focus from core application development.

Today, I’m excited to announce Amazon ECS Express Mode, a new capability from Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) that helps you launch highly available, scalable containerized applications with a single command. ECS Express Mode automates infrastructure setup including domains, networking, load balancing, and auto scaling through simplified APIs. This means you can focus on building applications while deploying with confidence using Amazon Web Services (AWS) best practices. Furthermore, when your applications evolve and require advanced features, you can seamlessly configure and access the full capabilities of the resources, including Amazon ECS.

You can get started with Amazon ECS Express Mode by navigating to the Amazon ECS console.

Amazon ECS Express Mode provides a simplified interface to the Amazon ECS service resource with new integrations for creating commonly used resources across AWS. ECS Express Mode automatically provisions and configures ECS clusters, task definitions, Application Load Balancers, auto scaling policies, and Amazon Route 53 domains from a single entry point.

Getting started with ECS Express Mode

Let me walk you through how to use Amazon ECS Express Mode. I’ll focus on the console experience, which provides the quickest way to deploy your containerized application.

For this example, I’m using a simple container image application running on Python with the Flask framework. Here’s the Dockerfile of my demo, which I have pushed to an Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) repository:

# Build stage
FROM python:3.6-slim as builder
WORKDIR /app
COPY requirements.txt .
RUN pip install --no-cache-dir --user -r requirements.txt gunicorn

# Runtime stage
FROM python:3.6-slim
WORKDIR /app
COPY --from=builder /root/.local /root/.local
COPY app.py .
ENV PATH=/root/.local/bin:$PATH
EXPOSE 80
CMD ["gunicorn", "--bind", "0.0.0.0:80", "app:app"]

On the Express Mode page, I choose Create. The interface is streamlined — I specify my container image URI from Amazon ECR, then select my task execution role and infrastructure role. If you don’t already have these roles, choose Create new role in the drop down to have one created for you from the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) managed policy.

If I want to customize the deployment, I can expand the Additional configurations section to define my cluster, container port, health check path, or environment variables.

In this section, I can also adjust CPU, memory, or scaling policies.

Setting up logs in Amazon CloudWatch Logs is something I always configure so I can troubleshoot my applications if needed. When I’m happy with the configurations, I choose Create.

After I choose Create, Express Mode automatically provisions a complete application stack, including an Amazon ECS service with AWS Fargate tasks, Application Load Balancer with health checks, auto scaling policies based on CPU utilization, security groups and networking configuration, and a custom domain with an AWS provided URL. I can also follow the progress in Timeline view on the Resources tab.

If I need to do a programmatic deployment, the same result can be achieved with a single AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) command:

aws ecs create-express-gateway-service 
--image [ACCOUNT_ID].ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/myapp:latest 
--execution-role-arn arn:aws:iam::[ACCOUNT_ID]:role/[IAM_ROLE] 
--infrastructure-role-arn arn:aws:iam::[ACCOUNT_ID]:role/[IAM_ROLE]

After it’s complete, I can see my application URL in the console and access my running application immediately.

After the application is created, I can see the details by visiting the specified cluster, or the default cluster if I didn’t specify one, in the ECS service to monitor performance, view logs, and manage the deployment.

When I need to update my application with a new container version, I can return to the console, select my Express service, and choose Update. I can use the interface to specify a new image URI or adjust resource allocations.

Alternatively, I can use the AWS CLI for updates:

aws ecs update-express-gateway-service 
  --service-arn arn:aws:ecs:us-west-2:[ACCOUNT_ID]:service/[CLUSTER_NAME]/[APP_NAME] 
  --primary-container '{
    "image": "[IMAGE_URI]"
  }'

I find the entire experience reduces setup complexity while still giving me access to all the underlying resources when I need more advanced configurations.

Additional things to know

Here are additional things about ECS Express Mode:

• Availability – ECS Express Mode is available in all AWS Regions at launch.
• Infrastructure as Code support – You can use IaC tools such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), or Terraform to deploy your applications using Amazon ECS Express Mode.
• Pricing – There is no additional charge to use Amazon ECS Express Mode. You pay for AWS resources created to launch and run your application.
• Application Load Balancer sharing – The ALB created is automatically shared across up to 25 ECS services using host-header based listener rules. This helps distribute the cost of the ALB significantly.

Get started with Amazon ECS Express Mode through the Amazon ECS console. Learn more on the Amazon ECS documentation page.

Happy building!

— Donnie

The post Build production-ready applications without infrastructure complexity using Amazon ECS Express Mode appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last week, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5—the world’s best coding model according to SWE-Bench – became available in Amazon Q command line interface (CLI) and Kiro. I’m excited about this for two reasons:

First, a few weeks ago I spent 4 intensive days with a global customer delivering an AI-assisted development workshop, where I experienced firsthand how Amazon Q CLI boosts developer productivity. During the workshop, the customer was able to add a new feature in their application within a day using Amazon Q CLI, which would have traditionally taken them at least a couple of weeks. With Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 in Amazon Q CLI, I know developer productivity will be enhanced further.

Second, I’ve started preparing for my code talk at AWS re:Invent 2025, where my co-speaker and I will show live coding to modernize a legacy codebase using Kiro. I can’t wait to use Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 in Kiro to create a live demo. If you want to see this demo and over a thousand other sessions on cloud and AI, join us at AWS re:Invent 2025 in Las Vegas from December 1–5.

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

• Availability of Claude Sonnet 4.5 in Amazon Bedrock – Anthropic’s most intelligent model, best for coding and complex agents, is now available in Amazon Bedrock. By using Claude Sonnet 4.5 in Amazon Bedrock, developers gain access to a fully managed service that not only provides a unified API for foundation models (FMs) but keeps their data under complete control with enterprise-grade tools for security, and optimization.
• AWS Outposts supports third-party storage integration with Dell and HPE – AWS Outposts third-party storage integration now includes Dell PowerStore and HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 systems, joining the list of existing integrations with NetApp on-premises enterprise storage arrays and Pure Storage FlashArray. This integration serves three key purposes. First, it helps you maintain your existing storage infrastructure while migrating VMware workloads to AWS. Second, it helps you meet strict data residency requirements by keeping your data on premises while using AWS services. Third, it means you can use AWS Outposts with third-party storage arrays through AWS tooling.
• Amazon ECS Managed Instances now available – Amazon ECS Managed Instances for containerized applications is a new fully managed compute option for Amazon ECS designed to eliminate infrastructure management overhead while giving you access to the full capabilities of Amazon EC2. ECS Managed Instances helps you quickly launch and scale your workloads while enhancing performance and reducing your total cost of ownership.
• Application map is now generally available for Amazon CloudWatch – Amazon CloudWatch now helps you monitor large-scale distributed applications by automatically discovering and organizing services into groups based on configurations and their relationships. With this new application performance monitoring (APM) capability, you can quickly visualize which applications and dependencies to focus on while troubleshooting your distributed applications.
• Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Model Context Protocol (MCP) server now available – With built-in support for runtime, gateway integration, identity management, and agent memory, the AgentCore MCP server is purpose-built to speed up creation of components compatible with Bedrock AgentCore. You can use the AgentCore MCP server for rapid prototyping, production AI solutions, or to scale your agent infrastructure.

Additional Updates
Here are some additional news items and blog posts that I found interesting:

• AWS Builder ID now supports Sign in with Google – You can now create an AWS Builder ID using sign in with Google. AWS Builder ID is a personal profile that provides access to AWS applications including Kiro, AWS Builder Center, AWS Training and Certification, AWS re:Post and AWS Startups.
• AWS API MCP Server v1.0.0 release – AWS API MCP server acts as a bridge between AI assistants and AWS services enabling foundation models to interact with any AWS API through natural language by creating and executing syntactically correct CLI commands. The AWS API MCP Server is open-source and available now on AWS Labs GitHub repository.
• AWS Knowledge MCP Server now generally available – The AWS Knowledge server gives AI agents and MCP clients access to authoritative knowledge, including documentation, blog posts, What’s New announcements, and Well-Architected best practices, in an LLM-compatible format. With this release, the server also includes knowledge about the regional availability of AWS APIs and CloudFormation resources.
• AWS Transform now enables Terraform for VMware network automation – AWS Transform now offers Terraform as an additional option to generate network infrastructure code automatically from VMware environments. The service converts your source network definitions into reusable Terraform modules, complementing current AWS CloudFormation and AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) support.

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

• AWS AI Agent Global Hackathon – This is your chance to dive deep into our powerful generative AI stack and create something truly awesome. From September 8th to October 20th, you have the opportunity to create AI agents using AWS suite of AI services, competing for over $45,000 in prizes and exclusive go-to-market opportunities.
• AWS Gen AI Lofts – You can learn AWS AI products and services with exclusive sessions, meet industry-leading experts, and have valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Register in your nearest city: Paris (October 7–21), London (Oct 13–21), and Tel Aviv (November 11–19).
• 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: Munich (October 7), Budapest (October 16).

You can browse all upcoming AWS events and AWS startup events.

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

— Prasad

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Bedrock, AWS Outposts, Amazon ECS Managed Instances, AWS Builder ID, and more (October 6, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, we’re announcing Amazon ECS Managed Instances, a new compute option for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) that enables developers to use the full range of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) capabilities while offloading infrastructure management responsibilities to Amazon Web Service (AWS). This new offering combines the operational simplicity of offloading infrastructure with the flexibility and control of Amazon EC2, which means customers can focus on building applications that drive innovation, while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) and maintaining AWS best practices.

Amazon ECS Managed Instances provides a fully managed container compute environment that supports a broad range of EC2 instance types and deep integration with AWS services. By default, it automatically selects the most cost-optimized EC2 instances for your workloads, but you can specify particular instance attributes or types when needed. AWS handles all aspects of infrastructure management, including provisioning, scaling, security patching, and cost optimization, enabling you to concentrate on building and running your applications.

Let’s try it out

Looking at the AWS Management Console experience for creating a new Amazon ECS cluster, I can see the new option for using ECS Managed Instances. Let’s take a quick tour of all the new options.

After I’ve selected Fargate and Managed Instances, I’m presented with two options. If I select Use ECS default, Amazon ECS will choose general purpose instance types based on grouping together pending Tasks, and picking the optimum instance type based on cost and resilience metrics. This is the most straightforward and recommended way to get started. Selecting Use custom – advanced opens up additional configuration parameters, where I can fine-tune the attributes of instances Amazon ECS will use.

By default, I see CPU and Memory as attributes, but I can select from 20 additional attributes to continue to filter the list of available instance types Amazon ECS can access.

After I’ve made my attribute selections, I see a list of all the instance types that match my choices.

From here, I can create my ECS cluster as usual and Amazon ECS will provision instances for me on my behalf based on the attributes and criteria I’ve defined in the previous steps.

Key features of Amazon ECS Managed Instances

With Amazon ECS Managed Instances, AWS takes full responsibility for infrastructure management, handling all aspects of instance provisioning, scaling, and maintenance. This includes implementing regular security patches initiated every 14 days (due to instance connection draining, the actual lifetime of the instance may be longer), with the ability to schedule maintenance windows using Amazon EC2 event windows to minimize disruption to your applications.

The service provides exceptional flexibility in instance type selection. Although it automatically selects cost-optimized instance types by default, you maintain the power to specify desired instance attributes when your workloads require specific capabilities. This includes options for GPU acceleration, CPU architecture, and network performance requirements, giving you precise control over your compute environment.

To help optimize costs, Amazon ECS Managed Instances intelligently manages resource utilization by automatically placing multiple tasks on larger instances when appropriate. The service continually monitors and optimizes task placement, consolidating workloads onto fewer instances to dry up, utilize and terminate idle (empty) instances, providing both high availability and cost efficiency for your containerized applications.

Integration with existing AWS services is seamless, particularly with Amazon EC2 features such as EC2 pricing options. This deep integration means that you can maximize existing capacity investments while maintaining the operational simplicity of a fully managed service.

Security remains a top priority with Amazon ECS Managed Instances. The service runs on Bottlerocket, a purpose-built container operating system, and maintains your security posture through automated security patches and updates. You can see all the updates and patches applied to the Bottlerocket OS image on the Bottlerocket website. This comprehensive approach to security keeps your containerized applications running in a secure, maintained environment.

Available now

Amazon ECS Managed Instances is available today in US East (North Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS Regions. You can start using Managed Instances through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) and AWS CloudFormation. You pay for the EC2 instances you use plus a management fee for the service.

To learn more about Amazon ECS Managed Instances, visit the documentation and get started simplifying your container infrastructure today.

The post Announcing Amazon ECS Managed Instances for containerized applications appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last week, Strands Agents, AWS open source for agentic AI SDK just hit 1 million downloads and earned 3,000+ GitHub Stars less than 4 months since launching as a preview in May 2025. With Strands Agents, you can build production-ready, multi-agent AI systems in a few lines of code.

We’ve continuously improved features including support for multi-agent patterns, A2A protocol, and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. You can use a collection of sample implementations to help you get started with building intelligent agents using Strands Agents. We always welcome your contribution and feedback to our project including bug reports, new features, corrections, or additional documentation.

Here is the latest research article of Amazon Science about the future of agentic AI and questions that scientists are asking about agent-to-agent communications, contextual understanding, common sense reasoning, and more. You can understand the technical topic of agentic AI with with relatable examples, including one about our personal behaviors about leaving doors open or closed, locked or unlocked.

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

• Amazon EC2 M4 and M4 Pro Mac instances – New M4 Mac instances offer up to 20% better application build performance compared to M2 Mac instances, while M4 Pro Mac instances deliver up to 15% better application build performance compared to M2 Pro Mac instances. These instances are ideal for building and testing applications for Apple platforms such as iOS, macOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, visionOS, and Safari.
• LocalStack integration in Visual Studio Code (VS Code) – You can use LocalStack to locally emulate and test your serverless applications using the familiar VS Code interface without switching between tools or managing complex setup, thus simplifying your local serverless development process.
• AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) Refactor (Preview) –You can rename constructs, move resources between stacks, and reorganize CDK applications while preserving the state of deployed resources. By using AWS CloudFormation’s refactor capabilities with automated mapping computation, CDK Refactor eliminates the risk of unintended resource replacement during code restructuring.
• AWS CloudTrail MCP Server – New AWS CloudTrail MCP server allows AI assistants to analyze API calls, track user activities, and perform advanced security analysis across your AWS environment through natural language interactions. You can explore more AWS MCP servers for working with AWS service resources.
• Amazon CloudFront support for IPv6 origins – Your applications can send IPv6 traffic all the way to their origins, allowing them to meet their architectural and regulatory requirements for IPv6 adoption. End-to-end IPv6 support improves network performance for end users connecting over IPv6 networks, and also removes concerns for IPv4 address exhaustion for origin infrastructure.

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 news items that you might find interesting:

• A city in the palm of your hand – Check out this interactive feature that explains how our AWS Trainium chip designers think like city planners, optimizing every nanometer to move data at near light speed.
• Measuring the effectiveness of software development tools and practices – Read how Amazon developers that identified specific challenges before adopting AI tools cut costs by 15.9% year-over-year using our cost-to-serve-software framework (CTS-SW). They deployed more frequently and reduced manual interventions by 30.4% by focusing on the right problems first.
• Become an AWS Cloud Club Captain – Join a growing network of student cloud enthusiasts by becoming an AWS Cloud Club Captain! As a Captain, you’ll get to organize events and building cloud communities while developing leadership skills. Application window is open September 1-28, 2025.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these upcoming AWS events as well as AWS re:Invent and AWS Summits:

• AWS AI Agent Global Hackathon – This is your chance to dive deep into our powerful generative AI stack and create something truly awesome. From September 8 to October 20, you have the opportunity to create AI agents using AWS suite of AI services, competing for over $45,000 in prizes and exclusive go-to-market opportunities.
• AWS Gen AI Lofts – You can learn AWS AI products and services with exclusive sessions and meet industry-leading experts, and have valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Register in your nearest city: Mexico City (September 30–October 2), Paris (October 7–21), London (Oct 13–21), and Tel Aviv (November 11–19).
• 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: Aotearoa and Poland (September 18), South Africa (September 20), Bolivia (September 20), Portugal (September 27), Germany (October 7), and Hungary (October 16).

You can browse all upcoming AWS events and AWS startup events.

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

— Channy

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Strands Agents 1M+ downloads, Cloud Club Captain, AI Agent Hackathon, and more (September 15, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, we are launching IPv6 support for Amazon API Gateway across all endpoint types, custom domains, and management APIs, in all commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. You can now configure REST, HTTP, and WebSocket APIs, and custom domains, to accept calls from IPv6 clients alongside the existing IPv4 support. You can also call API Gateway management APIs from dual-stack (IPv6 and IPv4) clients. As organizations globally confront growing IPv4 address scarcity and increasing costs, implementing IPv6 becomes critical for future-proofing network infrastructure. This dual-stack approach helps organizations maintain future network compatibility and expand global reach. To learn more about dualstack in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment, see the IPv6 on AWS Documentation.

Creating new dual-stack resources

This post focuses on two ways to create an API or a domain name with a dualstack IP address type: AWS Management Console and AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK).

AWS Console

When creating a new API or domain name in the console, select IPv4 only or dualstack (IPv4 and IPv6) for the IP address type.

As shown in the following image, you can select the dualstack option when creating a new REST API.For custom domain names, you can similarly configure dualstack as shown in the next image.

If you need to revert to IPv4-only for any reason, you can modify the IP address type setting, with no need to redeploy your API for the update to take effect.

REST APIs of all endpoint types (EDGE, REGIONAL and PRIVATE) support dualstack. Private REST APIs only support dualstack configuration.

AWS CDK

With AWS CDK, start by configuring a dual-stack REST API and domain name.

const api = new apigateway.RestApi(this, "Api", {
  restApiName: "MyDualStackAPI",
  endpointConfiguration: {ipAddressType: "dualstack"}
});

const domain_name = new apigateway.DomainName(this, "DomainName", {
  regionalCertificateArn: 'arn:aws:acm:us-east-1:111122223333:certificate/a1b2c3d4-5678-90ab',
  domainName: 'dualstack.example.com',
  endpointConfiguration: {
    types: ['Regional'],
    ipAddressType: 'dualstack'
  },
  securityPolicy: 'TLS_1_2'
});

const basepathmapping = new apigateway.BasePathMapping(this, "BasePathMapping", {
  domainName: domain_name,
  restApi: api
});

IPv6 Source IP and authorization

When your API begins receiving IPv6 traffic, client source IPs will be in IPv6 format. If you use resource policies, Lambda authorizers, or AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies that reference source IP addresses, make sure they’re updated to accommodate IPv6 address formats.

For example, to permit traffic from a specific IPv6 range in a resource policy.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": "*",
      "Action": "execute-api:Invoke",
      "Resource": "execute-api:stage-name/*",
      "Condition": {
        "IpAddress": {
          "aws:SourceIp": [
            "192.0.2.0/24",
            "2001:db8:1234::/48"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Summary

API Gateway dual-stack support helps manage IPv4 address scarcity and costs, comply with government and industry mandates, and prepare for the future of networking. The dualstack implementation provides a smooth transition path by supporting both IPv4 and IPv6 clients simultaneously.

To get started with API Gateway dual-stack support, visit the Amazon API Gateway documentation. You can configure dualstack for new APIs or update existing APIs with minimal configuration changes.

–Betty

Special thanks to Ellie Frank (elliesf), Anjali Gola (anjaligl), and Pranika Kakkar (pranika) for providing resources, answering questions, and offering valuable feedback during the writing process. This blog post was made possible through the collaborative support of the service and product management teams.

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The post Amazon API Gateway now supports dual-stack (IPv4 and IPv6) endpoints appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.