Today, we’re announcing the general availability of AWS Interconnect – multicloud, a managed private connectivity service that connects your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) directly to VPCs on other cloud providers. We’re also introducing AWS Interconnect – last mile, a new capability that simplifies how you establish high-speed, private connections to AWS from your branch offices, data centers, and remote locations through your existing network providers.

Large enterprises increasingly run workloads across multiple cloud providers, whether to use specialized services, meet data residency requirements, or support teams that have standardized on different providers. Connecting those environments reliably and securely has historically required significant coordination: managing VPN tunnels, working with colocation facilities, and configuring third-party network fabrics. The result is that your networking team spends time on undifferentiated heavy lifting instead of focusing on the applications that matter to your business.

AWS Interconnect is the answer to these challenges. It is a managed connectivity service that simplifies connectivity into AWS. Interconnect provides you the ability to establish private, high-speed network connections with dedicated bandwidth to and from AWS across hybrid and multicloud environments. You can configure resilient, end-to-end connectivity with ease in a few clicks through the AWS Console by selecting your location, partner, or cloud provider, preferred Region, and bandwidth requirements, removing the friction of discovering partners and the complexity of manual network configurations.

It comes with two capabilities: multicloud connectivity between AWS and other cloud providers, and last-mile connectivity between AWS and your private on-premises networks. Both capabilities are built on the same principle: a fully managed, turnkey experience that removes the infrastructure complexity from your team.

AWS Interconnect – multicloud

AWS Interconnect – multicloud gives you a private, managed Layer 3 connection between your AWS environment and other cloud providers, starting with Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure coming later in 2026. Traffic flows entirely over the AWS global backbone and the partner cloud’s private network, so it never traverses the public internet. This means you get predictable latency, consistent throughput, and isolation from internet congestion without having to manage any physical infrastructure yourself.

Security is built in by default. Every connection uses IEEE 802.1AE MACsec encryption on the physical links between AWS routers and the partner cloud provider’s routers at the interconnection facilities. You don’t need to configure these separately. Note that each cloud provider manages encryption independently on its own backbone, so you should review the encryption documentation for your specific deployment to verify it meets your compliance requirements. Resiliency is also built in: each connection spans multiple logical links distributed across at least two physical facilities, so a single device or building failure does not interrupt your connectivity.

For monitoring, AWS Interconnect – multicloud integrates with Amazon CloudWatch. You get a Network Synthetic Monitor included with each connection to track round-trip latency and packet loss, and bandwidth utilization metrics to support capacity planning.

AWS has published the underlying specification on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, providing any cloud service provider the opportunity to collaborate with AWS Interconnect – multicloud. To become an AWS Interconnect partner, cloud providers must implement the technical specification and meet AWS operational requirements, including resiliency standards, support commitments, and service level agreements.

How it works

Provisioning a connection takes minutes. I create the connection from the AWS Direct Connect console. I start from the AWS Interconnect section and select Google Cloud as the provider. I select my source and destination regions. I specify bandwidth, and provide my Google Cloud project ID. AWS generates an activation key that I use on the Google Cloud side to complete the connection. Routes propagate automatically in both directions, and my workloads can start exchanging data shortly after.

For this demo, I start with a single VPC and I connect it to a Google Cloud VPC. I use a Direct Connect Gateway. It’s the simplest path: one connection, one attachment, and my workloads on both sides can start talking to each other in minutes.

Step 1: request an interconnect in the AWS Management Console.

I navigate to AWS Direct Connect, AWS Interconnect and I select Create. I first choose the cloud provider I want to connect to. In this example, Google Cloud.

Then, I choose the AWS Region (eu-central-1) and the Google Cloud Region (europe-west3).

On step 3, I enter Description,I choose the Bandwidth, the Direct Connect gateway to attach, and the ID of my Google Cloud project.

After reviewing and confirming the request, the console gives me an activation key. I will use that key to validate the request on the Google cloud side.

Step 2: create the transport and VPC Peering resources on my Google Cloud Platform (GCP) account.

Now that I have the activation key, I continue the process on the GCP side. At the time of this writing, no web-based console was available. I choose to use the GCP command line (CLI) instead. I take note of the CIDR range in the GCP VPC subnet in the europe-west3 region. Then, I open a Terminal and type:

gcloud network-connectivity transports create aws-news-blog 
    --region=europe-west3  
    --activation-key=${ACTIVATION_KEY} 
    --network=default 
    --advertised-routes=10.156.0.0/20

Create request issued for: [aws-news-blog]
...
peeringNetwork: projects/oxxxp-tp/global/networks/transport-9xxxf-vpc
...
state: PENDING_CONFIG
updateTime: '2026-03-19T09:30:51.103979219Z'

It takes a couple of minutes for the command to complete. Once the command returns, I create a peering between my GCP VPC and the new transport I just created. I can do that in the GCP console or with the gcloud command line. Because I was using the Terminal for the previous command, I continued with the command line:

gcloud compute networks peerings create aws-news-blog 
      --network=default 
      --peer-network=projects/oxxxp-tp/global/networks/transport-9xxxf-vpc 
      --import-custom-routes 
      --export-custom-routes

The network name is the name of my GCP VPC. The peer network is given in the output of the previous command.

Once completed, I can verify the peering in the GCP console.

In the AWS Interconnect console, I verify the status is available.

In the AWS Direct Connect console, under Direct Connect gateways, I see the attachment to the new interconnect.

Step 3: associate the new gateway on the AWS side

I select Gateway associations and Associate gateway to attach the Virtual Private Gateway (VGW) that I created before starting this demo (pay attention to use a VGW in the same AWS Region as the interconnect)

You don’t need to configure the network routing on the GCP side. On AWS, there is a final step: add a route entry in your VPC Route tables to send all traffic to the GCP IP address range through the Virtual Gateway.

Once the network setup is done. I start two compute instances, one on AWS and one on GCP.

On AWS, I verify the Security Group accepts ingress traffic on TCP:8080. I connect to the machine and I start a minimal web server:

python3 -c 
"from http.server import HTTPServer, BaseHTTPRequestHandler 
class H(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
   def do_GET(self):
      self.send_response(200);self.end_headers()
      self.wfile.write(b'Hello AWS World!nn')
HTTPServer(('',8080),H).serve_forever()"

On the GCP side, I open a SSH session to the machine and I call the AWS web server by its private IP address.

Et voilà! I have a private network route between my two networks, entirely managed by the two Cloud Service Providers.

Things to know

There are a couple of configuration options that you should keep in mind:

• When connecting networks, pay attention to the IP addresses range on both sides. The GCP and AWS VPC ranges can’t overlap. For this demo, the default range on AWS was 172.31.0.0/16and the default on GCP was 10.156.0.0/20. I was able to proceed with these default values.
• You can configure IPV4, IPV6, or both on each side. You must select the same option on both sides.
• The Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) must be the same on both VPC. The default values for AWS VPCs and GCP VPCs are not. MTU is the largest packet size, in bytes, that a network interface can transmit without fragmentation. Mismatched MTU sizes between peered VPCs cause packet drops or fragmentation, leading to silent data loss, degraded throughput, and broken connections across the interconnect.
• For more details, refer to the GCP Partner Cross Cloud Interconnect and the AWS Interconnect User Guide.

Reference architectures

When your deployment grows and you have multiple VPCs in a single region, AWS Transit Gateway gives you a centralized routing hub to connect them all through a single Interconnect attachment. You can segment traffic between environments, apply consistent routing policies, and integrate AWS Network Firewall if you need to inspect what crosses the cloud boundary.

And when you’re operating at global scale, with workloads spread across multiple AWS Regions and multiple Google Cloud environments, AWS Cloud WAN extends that same model across the world. Any region in your network can reach any Interconnect attachment globally, with centralized policy management and segment-based routing that applies consistently everywhere you operate.

My colleagues Alexandra and Santiago documented these reference architectures in their blog post: Build resilient and scalable multicloud connectivity architectures with AWS Interconnect – multicloud.

AWS Interconnect – last mile

Based on the same architecture and design as AWS Interconnect – multicloud, AWS Interconnect – last mile provides the ability to connect your on-premises or remote location to AWS through a participating network provider’s last-mile infrastructure, directly from the AWS Management Console.

The onboarding process mirrors AWS Interconnect – multicloud: you select a provider, authenticate, and specify your connection endpoints and bandwidth. AWS generates an activation key that you provide in the provider console to complete the configuration. AWS Interconnect – last mile automatically provisions four redundant connections across two physical locations, configures BGP routing, and activates MACsec encryption and Jumbo Frames by default. The result is a resilient private connection to AWS that aligns with best practices, without requiring you to manually configure networking components.

AWS Interconnect – last mile supports bandwidths from 1 Gbps to 100 Gbps, and you can adjust bandwidth from the console without reprovisioning. The service includes a 99.99% availability SLA up to the Direct Connect port and bundles CloudWatch Network Synthetic Monitor for connection health monitoring. Just like AWS Interconnect – multicloud, AWS Interconnect – last mile attaches to a Direct Connect Gateway, which connects to your Virtual Private Gateway, Transit Gateway, or AWS Cloud WAN deployment. For more details, refer to the AWS Interconnect User Guide.

Scott Yow, SVP Product at Lumen Technologies, wrote:

By combining AWS Interconnect – last mile with Lumen fiber network and Cloud Interconnect, we simplify the last-mile complexity that often slows cloud adoption and enable a faster, and more resilient path to AWS for customers.

Pricing and availability

AWS Interconnect – multicloud and AWS Interconnect – last mile pricing is based on a flat hourly rate for the capacity you request, billed prorata by the hour. You select the bandwidth tier that fits your workload needs.

AWS Interconnect – multicloud pricing varies by region pair: a connection between US East (N. Virginia) and Google Cloud N. Virginia is priced differently from a connection between US East (N. Virginia) and a more distant region. When you use AWS Cloud WAN, the global any-to-any routing model means traffic can traverse multiple regions, which affects the total cost of your deployment. I recommend reviewing the AWS Interconnect pricing page for the full rate card by region pair and capacity tier before sizing your connection.

AWS Interconnect – multicloud is available today in five region pairs: US East (N. Virginia) to Google Cloud N. Virginia, US West (N. California) to Google Cloud Los Angeles, US West (Oregon) to Google Cloud Oregon, Europe (London) to Google Cloud London, and Europe (Frankfurt) to Google Cloud Frankfurt. Microsoft Azure support is coming later in 2026.

AWS Interconnect – last mile is launching in US East (N. Virginia) with Lumen as the initial partner. Additional partners, including AT&T and Megaport, are in progress, and additional regions are planned.

To get started with AWS Interconnect, visit the AWS Direct Connect console and select AWS Interconnect from the navigation menu.

I’d love to hear how you’re using AWS Interconnect in your environment. Leave a comment below or reach out through the AWS re:Post community.

— seb

The post AWS Interconnect is now generally available, with a new option to simplify last-mile connectivity appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Here are the notable launches and updates from last week that can help you build, scale, and innovate on AWS.

Last week’s launches

Here are the launches that got my attention this week.

Let’s start with news related to compute and networking infrastructure:

• Introducing Amazon EC2 C8id, M8id, and R8id instances: These new Amazon EC2 C8id, M8id, and R8id instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors. These instances offer up to 43% higher performance and 3.3x more memory bandwidth compared to previous generation instances.
• AWS Network Firewall announces new price reductions: The service has added the hourly and data processing discounts on NAT Gateways that are service-chained with Network Firewall secondary endpoints. Additionally, AWS Network Firewall has removed additional data processing charges for Advanced Inspection, which enables Transport Layer Security (TLS) inspection of encrypted network traffic.
• Amazon ECS adds Network Load Balancer support for Linear and Canary deployments: Applications that commonly use NLB, such as those requiring TCP/UDP-based connections, low latency, long-lived connections, or static IP addresses, can take advantage of managed, incremental traffic shifting natively from ECS when rolling out updates.
• AWS Config now supports 30 new resource types: These range across key services including Amazon EKS, Amazon Q, and AWS IoT. This expansion provides greater coverage over your AWS environment, enabling you to more effectively discover, assess, audit, and remediate an even broader range of resources.
• Amazon DynamoDB global tables now support replication across multiple AWS accounts: DynamoDB global tables are a fully managed, serverless, multi-Region, and multi-active database. With this new capability, you can replicate tables across AWS accounts and Regions to improve resiliency, isolate workloads at the account level, and apply distinct security and governance controls.
• Amazon RDS now provides an enhanced console experience to connect to a database: The new console experience provides ready-made code snippets for Java, Python, Node.js, and other programming languages as well as tools like the psql command line utility. These code snippets are automatically adjusted based on your database’s authentication settings. For example, if your cluster uses IAM authentication, the generated code snippets will use token-based authentication to connect to the database. The console experience also includes integrated CloudShell access, offering the ability to connect to your databases directly from within the RDS console.

Then, I noticed three news items related to security and how you authenticate on AWS:

• AWS Builder ID now supports Sign in with Apple: AWS Builder ID, your profile for accessing AWS applications including AWS Builder Center, AWS Training and Certification, AWS re:Post, AWS Startups, and Kiro, now supports sign-in with Apple as a social login provider. This expansion of sign-in options builds on the existing sign-in with Google capability, providing Apple users with a streamlined way to access AWS resources without managing separate credentials on AWS.
• AWS STS now supports validation of select identity provider specific claims from Google, GitHub, CircleCI and OCI: You can reference these custom claims as condition keys in IAM role trust policies and resource control policies, expanding your ability to implement fine-grained access control for federated identities and help you establish your data perimeters. This enhancement builds upon IAM’s existing OIDC federation capabilities, which allow you to grant temporary AWS credentials to users authenticated through external OIDC-compatible identity providers.
• AWS Management Console now displays Account Name on the Navigation bar for easier account identification: You now have an easy way to identify your accounts at a glance. You can now quickly distinguish between accounts visually using the account name that appears in the navigation bar for all authorized users in that account.
• Amazon CloudFront announces mutual TLS support for origins: Now with origin mTLS support, you can implement a standardized, certificate-based authentication approach that eliminates operational burden. This enables organizations to enforce strict authentication for their proprietary content, ensuring that only verified CloudFront distributions can establish connections to backend infrastructure ranging from AWS origins and on-premises servers to third-party cloud providers and external CDNs.

Finally, there is not a single week without news around AI :

• Claude Opus 4.6 now available in Amazon Bedrock: Opus 4.6 is Anthropic’s most intelligent model to date and a premier model for coding, enterprise agents, and professional work. Claude Opus 4.6 brings advanced capabilities to Amazon Bedrock customers, including industry-leading performance for agentic tasks, complex coding projects, and enterprise-grade workflows that require deep reasoning and reliability.
• Structured outputs now available in Amazon Bedrock: Amazon Bedrock now supports structured outputs, a capability that provides consistent, machine-readable responses from foundation models that adhere to your defined JSON schemas. Instead of prompting for valid JSON and adding extra checks in your application, you can specify the format you want and receive responses that match it—making production workflows more predictable and resilient.

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.

— seb

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Opus 4.6 in Amazon Bedrock, AWS Builder ID Sign in with Apple, and more (February 9, 2026) 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.

Many organizations rely on the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) as the industry standard for exchanging critical business data. Traditionally, securely connecting to private SFTP servers required custom infrastructure, manual scripting, or exposing endpoints to the public internet.

Today, AWS Transfer Family SFTP connectors now support connectivity to remote SFTP servers through Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environments. You can transfer files between Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and private or public SFTP servers while applying the security controls and network configurations already defined in your VPC. This capability helps you integrate data sources across on-premises environments, partner-hosted private servers, or internet-facing endpoints, with the operational simplicity of a fully managed Amazon Web Services (AWS) service.

New capabilities with SFTP connectors
The following are the key enhancements:

• Connect to private SFTP servers – SFTP connectors can now reach endpoints that are only accessible within your AWS VPC connection. These include servers hosted in your VPC or a shared VPC, on-premises systems connected over AWS Direct Connect, and partner-hosted servers connected through VPN tunnels.
• Security and compliance – All file transfers are routed through the security controls already applied in your VPC, such as AWS Network Firewall or centralized ingress and egress inspection. Private SFTP servers remain private and don’t need to be exposed to the internet. You can also present static Elastic IP or bring your own IP (BYOIP) addresses to meet partner allowlist requirements.
• Performance and simplicity – By using your own network resources such as NAT gateways, AWS Direct Connect or VPN connections, connectors can take advantage of higher bandwidth capacity for large-scale transfers. You can configure connectors in minutes through the AWS Management Console,  AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS SDKs without building custom scripts or third-party tools.

How VPC- based SFTP connections work
SFTP connectors use Amazon VPC Lattice resources to establish secure connectivity through your VPC. Key constructs include a resource configuration and a resource gateway. The resource configuration represents the target SFTP server, which you specify using a private IP address or public DNS name. The resource gateway provides SFTP connector access to these configurations, enabling file transfers to flow through your VPC and its security controls.

The following architecture diagram illustrates how traffic flows between Amazon S3 and remote SFTP servers. As shown in the architecture, traffic flows from Amazon S3 through the SFTP connector into your VPC. A resource gateway is the entry point that handles inbound connections from the connector to your VPC resources. Outbound traffic is routed through your configured egress path, using Amazon VPC NAT gateways with Elastic IPs for public servers or AWS Direct Connect and VPN connections for private servers. You can use existing IP addresses from your VPC CIDR range, simplifying partner server allowlists. Centralized firewalls in the VPC enforce security policies, and customer-owned NAT gateways provide higher bandwidth for large-scale transfers.

When to use this feature
With this capability, developers and IT administrators can simplify workflows while meeting security and compliance requirements across a range of scenarios:

• Hybrid environments – Transfer files between Amazon S3 and on-premises SFTP servers using AWS Direct Connect or AWS Site-to-Site VPN, without exposing endpoints to the internet.
• Partner integrations – Connect with business partners’ SFTP servers that are only accessible through private VPN tunnels or shared VPCs. This avoids building custom scripts or managing third-party tools, reducing operational complexity.
• Regulated industries – Route file transfers through centralized firewalls and inspection points in VPCs to comply with financial services, government, or healthcare security requirements.
• High-throughput transfers – Use your own network configurations such as NAT gateways, AWS Direct Connect, or VPN connections with Elastic IP or BYOIP to handle large-scale, high-bandwidth transfers while retaining IP addresses already on partner allowlists.
• Unified file transfer solution – Standardize on Transfer Family for both internal and external SFTP connectivity, reducing fragmentation across file transfer tools.

Start building with SFTP connectors
To begin transferring files with SFTP connectors through my VPC environment, I follow these steps:

First, I configure my VPC Lattice resources. In the Amazon VPC console, under PrivateLink and Lattice in the navigation pane, I choose Resource gateways, choose Create resource gateway to create one to act as the ingress point into my VPC. Next, under PrivateLink and Lattice in the navigation pane, I choose Resource configuration and choose Create resource configuration to create a resource configuration for my target SFTP server. Specify the private IP address or public DNS name, and the port (typically 22).

Then, I configure AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions. I ensure that the IAM role used for connector creation has transfer:* permissions, and VPC Lattice permissions (vpc-lattice:CreateServiceNetworkResourceAssociation, vpc-lattice:GetResourceConfiguration, vpc-lattice:AssociateViaAWSService). I update the trust policy on the IAM role to specify transfer.amazonaws.com as a trusted principal. This enables AWS Transfer Family to assume the role when creating and managing my SFTP connectors.

After that, I create an SFTP connector through the AWS Transfer Family console. I choose SFTP Connectors and then choose Create SFTP connector. In the Connector configuration section, I select VPC Lattice as the egress type, then provide the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the Resource Configuration, Access role, and Connector credentials. Optionally, include a trusted host key for enhanced security, or override the default port if my SFTP server uses a nonstandard port.

Next, I test the connection. On the Actions menu, I choose Test connection to confirm that the connector can reach the target SFTP server.

Finally, after the connector status is ACTIVE, I can begin file operations with my remote SFTP server programmatically by calling Transfer Family APIs such as StartDirectoryListing, StartFileTransfer, StartRemoteDelete, or StartRemoteMove. All traffic is routed through my VPC using my configured resources such as NAT gateways, AWS Direct Connect, or VPN connections together with my IP addresses and security controls.

For the complete set of options and advanced workflows, refer to the AWS Transfer Family documentation.

Now available

SFTP connectors with VPC-based connectivity are now available in 21 AWS Regions. Check the AWS Services by Region for the latest supported AWS Regions. You can now securely connect AWS Transfer Family SFTP connectors to private, on-premises, or internet-facing servers using your own VPC resources such as NAT gateways, Elastic IPs, and network firewalls.

— Betty

The post AWS Transfer Family SFTP connectors now support VPC-based connectivity appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Summer is well and truly here in the UK! I’m a bit of a summer grinch though so, unlike most people, I’m not crazy about “the glorious sun” scorching me when I’m out and about. On the upside, this provides the perfect excuse to retreat to the comfort of a well-ventilated room where I can focus on coding and curating the latest AWS releases to bring you the highlights.

I also managed to escape the heat for most of yesterday while recording an episode for the AWS Developers Podcast where the wonderful Sebastien Stormaq and Tiffany Souterre interviewed me about games development. If you haven’t discovered it yet, I highly recommend you give it a go as the episodes are full of interesting lessons and insights from not just AWS, but customers and community members who share their stories and expertise in a relaxed conversation.

Alright, ready to discover some of the new things we released last week? Here are the highlights.

AWS Builder Center
There is a new home for AWS builders and community members! AWS Builder Center is a new place where cloud builders can connect, share knowledge, and access resources to enhance their AWS journey. The platform enables users to join community programs, discover trending topics, access AWS Skill Builder courses, participate in technical challenges, and more, using a single Builder ID sign-in.

One the features that I’m personally most excited about is the Wishlist. You can now create wishes and tell AWS directly about ways to improve our products and services or share original ideas that you think could help you and your teams. You can also browse and upvote existing wishes to support any suggestions that you think should be prioritized. The AWS teams will keep an eye on this and if a wish has enough traction it may just be considered!

Read the news blog post for a quick tour through some of the most exciting features or head over to AWS Builder Center and start exploring!

AI
The world of AI keeps moving fast and changing our world, by providing new and exciting ways to do things and become more productive. Here are two releases from last week that caught my attention.

• Amazon Q chat in the AWS Management Console can now query AWS service data – Amazon Q Developer expands its capabilities by enabling natural language queries of data stored across AWS services like S3, DynamoDB, and CloudWatch, directly from the AWS Console, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and AWS Console Mobile Application. This enhancement streamlines cloud management and troubleshooting by allowing users to access and analyze service data through conversational interfaces, with access controls managed through IAM permissions.
• Amazon CloudWatch and Application Signals MCP servers for AI-assisted troubleshooting – AWS has released two new Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers – CloudWatch MCP and Application Signals MCP – that enable AI agents to leverage observability data for automated troubleshooting through conversational interfaces. These open-source servers allow AI assistants to analyze metrics, alarms, logs, traces, and service health data across AWS environments, streamlining incident response and root cause analysis without requiring developers to manually navigate multiple AWS consoles.

Oracle Database@AWS
It seems like yesterday when Andy Jassy announced our partnership with Oracle to create Oracle Database@AWS, a jointly offered service that runs Oracle databases on Exadata infrastructure directly within AWS data centers, providing a unified AWS-Oracle experience. Fast forward to last week and Oracle Database@AWS has reached a significant milestone with its general availability release. It is now available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions, with plans to expand to 20 additional regions globally.

In addition, VPC Lattice has added support for Oracle Database@AWS enabling seamless connectivity between applications in VPCs and on-premises environments to Oracle database networks. The integration simplifies network management and provides secure access from Oracle Database@AWS to AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift, without requiring complex networking setup.

So if you’re looking to migrate your Oracle database workloads, now is a great time to explore Oracle Database@AWS as it offers a compelling path forward with minimal modifications required.

Additional highlights
Here are some other releases that I think many people will be happy about.

• AWS Config now supports 12 new resource types – AWS Config has expanded its monitoring capabilities with support for 12 new resource types across services including BackupGateway, CloudFront, EntityResolution, Bedrock, and more. These additions are automatically tracked if you have enabled recording for all resource types, enhancing your ability to discover, assess, and audit AWS resources.
• Amazon SageMaker Studio now supports remote connections from Visual Studio Code – Amazon SageMaker Studio now supports remote connections from Visual Studio Code, allowing developers to use their familiar VS Code setup while leveraging SageMaker’s scalable compute resources for AI development.
• AWS Network Firewall: Native AWS Transit Gateway support in all regions – AWS Network Firewall now offers native integration with AWS Transit Gateway across all supported regions, enabling direct attachment and simplified traffic inspection between VPCs and on-premises networks. This integration eliminates the need for managing dedicated VPC subnets and route tables while providing multi-AZ redundancy for improved security and reliability.

Upcoming AWS Events
AWS Summit New York – this is definitely one to watch…literally! Registrations are closed due to capacity but you can tune in to watch live all the announcements and launches! No spoilers, but, trust me, there are a quite a few exciting things in store, so make sure to check it out.

AWS Gen AI Lofts – AWS Gen AI Lofts are multi-day events offering hands-on workshops, expert guidance, and networking opportunities for developers and business leaders looking to explore or advance their generative AI journey. These events are hosted across multiple global locations including San Francisco, Berlin, Dubai, Dublin, Bengaluru, Manchester, Paris, and Tel Aviv, providing accessible opportunities to accelerate your generative AI adoption.

And that’s it for this week! Come back next Monday for more highlights and keep your AWS knowledge up to date as we cover the latest releases.

Matheus Guimaraes | @codingmatheus

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Builder Center, Amazon Q, Oracle Database@AWS, and more (July 14, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last week’s hallmark event was the security-focused AWS re:Inforce conference.

Now a tradition, the blog team wrote a re:Cap post to summarize the announcements and link to some of the top blog posts.

To further summarize, several new security innovations were announced, including enhanced IAM Access Analyzer capabilities, MFA enforcement for root users, and threat intelligence integration with AWS Network Firewall. Other notable updates include exportable public SSL/TLS certificates from AWS Certificate Manager, a simplified AWS WAF console experience, and a new AWS Shield feature for proactive network security (in preview). Additionally, AWS Security Hub has been enhanced for risk prioritization (Preview), and Amazon GuardDuty now supports Amazon EKS clusters.

But my favorite announcement came from the Amazon Verified Permissions team. They released an open source package for Express.js, enabling developers to implement external fine-grained authorization for web application APIs. This simplifies authorization integration, reducing code complexity and improving application security.

The team also published a blog post that outlines how to create a Verified Permissions policy store, add Cedar and Verified Permissions authorisation middleware to your app, create and deploy a Cedar schema, and create and deploy Cedar policies. The Cedar schema is generated from an OpenAPI specification and formatted for use with the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).

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

Last week’s launches
Apart from re:Inforce, here are the launches that got my attention.

Kafka customers use Avro and Protobuf formats for efficient data storage, fast serialization and deserialization, schema evolution support, and interoperability between different programming languages. They utilize schema registries to manage, evolve, and validate schemas before data enters processing pipelines. Previously, you were required to write custom code within your Lambda function to validate, deserialize, and filter events when using these data formats. With this launch, Lambda natively supports Avro and Protobuf, as well as integration with GSR, CCSR, and SCSR. This enables you to process your Kafka events using these data formats without writing custom code. Additionally, you can optimize costs through event filtering to prevent unnecessary function invocations.

• Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports atomic renaming of objects with a single API call – The RenameObject API simplifies data management in S3 directory buckets by transforming a multi-step rename operation into a single API call. This means you can now rename objects in S3 Express One Zone by specifying an existing object’s name as the source and the new name as the destination within the same S3 directory bucket. With no data movement involved, this capability accelerates applications like log file management, media processing, and data analytics, while also lowering costs. For instance, renaming a 1-terabyte log file can now complete in milliseconds, instead of hours, significantly accelerating applications and reducing costs.
• Valkey introduces GLIDE 2.0 with support for Go, OpenTelemetry, and pipeline batching – AWS, in partnership with Google and the Valkey community, announces the general availability of General Language Independent Driver for the Enterprise (GLIDE) 2.0. This is the latest release of one of AWS’s official open-source Valkey client libraries. Valkey, the most permissive open-source alternative to Redis, is stewarded by the Linux Foundation and will always remain open-source. Valkey GLIDE is a reliable, high-performance, multi-language client that supports all Valkey commands

Read moreSkipping the WHM Getting Started Wizard | cPanel Blog GLIDE 2.0 introduces new capabilities that expand developer support, improve observability, and optimise performance for high-throughput workloads. Valkey GLIDE 2.0 extends its multi-language support to Go (contributed by Google), joining Java, Python, and Node.js to provide a consistent, fully compatible API experience across all four languages. More language support is on the way. With this release, Valkey GLIDE now supports OpenTelemetry, an open-source, vendor-neutral framework that enables developers to generate, collect, and export telemetry data and critical client-side performance insights. Additionally, GLIDE 2.0 introduces batching capabilities, reducing network overhead and latency for high-frequency use cases by allowing multiple commands to be grouped and executed as a single operation. You can discover more about Valkey GLIDE in this recent episode of the AWS Developers Podcast: Inside Valkey GLIDE: building a next-gen Valkey client library with Rust.

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

Some other reading
My Belgian compatriot Alexis has written the first article of a two-part series explaining how to develop an MCP Tool server with a streamable HTTP transport and deploy it on Lambda and API Gateway. This is a must-read for anyone implementing MCP servers on AWS. I’m eagerly looking forward to the second part, where Alexis will discuss authentication and authorization for remote MCP servers.

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

AWS GenAI Lofts are collaborative spaces and immersive experiences that showcase AWS expertise in cloud computing and AI. They provide startups and developers with hands-on access to AI products and services, exclusive sessions with industry leaders, and valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Find a GenAI Loft location near you and don’t forget to register.

AWS Summits are 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: Japan (this week June 25 – 26), Online in India (June 26), New-York City (July 16).

Save the date for these upcoming Summits in July and August: Taipei (July 29), Jakarta (August 7), Mexico (August 8), São Paulo (August 13), and Johannesburg (August 20) (and more to come in September and October).

Browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events here.

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

— seb

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

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: re:Inforce re:Cap, Valkey GLIDE 2.0, Avro and Protobuf or MCP Servers on Lambda, and more (June 23, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

The AWS Heroes program recognizes a vibrant, worldwide group of AWS experts whose enthusiasm for knowledge-sharing has a real impact within the community. Heroes go above and beyond to share knowledge in a variety of ways in developer community. We introduce our newest AWS Heroes in the second quarter of 2025.

To find and connect with more AWS Heroes near you, visit the categories in which they specialize Community Heroes, Container Heroes, Data Heroes, DevTools Heroes, Machine Learning Heroes, Security Heroes, and Serverless Heroes.

Last week’s launches
In addition to the inspiring celebrations, here are some AWS launches that caught my attention.

• Agentic capabilities for Amazon Q Developer Chat in the AWS Management Console and chat applications – In the AWS Management Console, Microsoft Teams, and Slack, Amazon Q Developer can now answer more complex queries by automatically identifying appropriate tools across more than 200 AWS services, breaking queries into executable steps, and showing its reasoning process as it works.
• Claude Sonnet 4 model on Amazon Q Developer CLI – Amazon Q Developer CLI now supports Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 and allows developers to switch between premium models (Sonnet 4, 3.7, and 3.5) using simple commands like /model or q chat --model.
• Amazon API Gateway now supports dynamic request routing for REST APIs – Amazon API Gateway now supports routing rules for REST APIs using custom domain names, allowing traffic distribution based on HTTP headers, URL base paths, or both.
• Amazon Athena announces managed query results to streamline analysis workflows – Managed query results is a new feature that automatically stores, encrypts, and manages the lifecycle of query results for customers at no additional cost.
• A new monitoring dashboard in the AWS Network Firewall console – The new dashboard provides enhanced visibility into network traffic patterns, including top flows, TLS Server Name Indication (SNI), HTTP Host headers, long-lived TCP connections, and failed TCP handshakes.

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

Other AWS news
Here are some additional projects, blog posts that you might find interesting:

• Up to 45 percent price reduction for Amazon EC2 NVIDIA GPU-accelerated instances – AWS is reducing the price of NVIDIA GPU-accelerated Amazon EC2 instances (P4d, P4de, P5, and P5en) by up to 45 percent for On-Demand and Savings Plan usage. We are also making the very new P6-B200 instances available through Savings Plans to support large-scale deployments.
• Introducing public AWS API models – AWS now provides daily updates of Smithy API models on GitHub, enabling developers to build custom SDK clients, understand AWS API behaviors, and create developer tools for better AWS service integration.
• The AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region is now open – The new Region provides customers with data residency requirements to securely store data in Taiwan while providing even lower latency. Customers across industries can benefit from the secure, scalable, and reliable cloud infrastructure to drive digital transformation and innovation.
• Amazon EC2 has simplified the AMI cleanup workflow – Amazon EC2 now supports automatically deleting underlying Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots when deregistering Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).
• The Lab where AWS designs custom chips – Visit Annapurna Labs in Austin, Texas—a combination of offices, workshops, and even a mini data center—where Amazon Web Services (AWS) engineers are designing the future of computing.

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

• Join re:Inforce from anywhere – If you aren’t able to make it to Philadelphia (June 16–18), tune in remotely. Get free access to the re:Inforce keynote and innovation talks live as they happen.
• 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: Shanghai (June 19 – 20), Milano (June 18), Mumbai (June 19) and Japan (June 25 – 26).
• AWS re:Invent – Mark your calendars for AWS re:Invent (December 1 – 5) in Las Vegas. Registration is now open
• 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: Mexico (June 14), Nairobi, Kenya (June 14) and Colombia (June 28)

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

– Betty

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: New AWS Heroes, Amazon Q Developer, EC2 GPU price reduction, and more (June 9, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

It’s AWS Summit Season! AWS Summits are free in-person events that take place across the globe in major cities, bringing cloud expertise to local communities. Each AWS Summit features keynote presentations highlighting the latest innovations, technical sessions, live demos, and interactive workshops led by Amazon Web Services (AWS) experts. Last week, events took place at AWS Summit Tel Aviv and AWS Summit Singapore.

The following photo shows the packed keynote at AWS Summit Tel Aviv.

Find an AWS Summit near you and join thousands of AWS customers and cloud professionals taking the next step in their cloud journey.

Last week, the announcement that piqued my interest most was the general availability of Amazon Aurora DSQL, which was introduced in preview at re:Invent 2024. Aurora DSQL is the fastest serverless distributed SQL database that enables you to build always available applications with virtually unlimited scalability, the highest availability, and zero infrastructure management.

Aurora DSQL active-active distributed architecture is designed for 99.99% single-Region and 99.999% multi-Region availability with no single point of failure and automated failure recovery. This means your applications can continue to read and write with strong consistency, even in the rare case an application is unable to connect to a Region cluster endpoint.

What’s more fascinating is the journey behind building Aurora DSQL, a story that goes beyond the technology in the pursuit of engineering efficiency. Read the full story in Dr. Werner Vogels’ blog post, Just make it scale: An Aurora DSQL story.

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

• Announcing new Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for AWS Serverless and Containers – MCP servers are now available for AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and Finch. With MCP servers, you can get from idea to production faster by giving your AI assistants access to an up-to-date framework on how to correctly interact with your AWS service of choice. To download and try out the open source MCP servers, visit the aws-labs GitHub repository.
• Announcing the general availability of Amazon FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering – FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering, a new storage class, automatically optimizes costs by tiering cold data to the applicable lower-cost storage tier based on access patterns and includes an optional SSD read cache to improve performance for your most latency-sensitive workloads.
• Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP now supports write-back mode for ONTAP FlexCache volumes – Write-back mode is a new ONTAP capability that helps you achieve faster performance for your write-intensive workloads that are distributed across multiple AWS Regions and on-premises file systems.
• AWS Network Firewall Adds Support for Multiple VPC Endpoints – AWS Network Firewall now supports configuring up to 50 Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoints per Availability Zone for a single firewall. This new capability gives you more options to scale your Network Firewall deployment across multiple VPCs, using a centralized security policy.
• Cost Optimization Hub now supports Savings Plans and reservations preferences – You can now use Cost Optimization Hub, a feature within the Billing and Cost Management Console, to configure preferred Savings Plans and reservation term and payment options preferences, so you can see your resulting recommendations and savings potential based on your preferred commitments.
• AWS Neuron introduces NxD Inference GA, new features, and improved tools – With the release of Neuron 2.23, the NxD Inference library (NxDI) moves from beta to general availability and is now recommended for all multi-chip inference use cases. Neuron 2.23 also introduces new training capabilities, including context parallelism and Odds Ratio Preference Optimization (ORPO), and adds support for PyTorch 2.6 and JAX 0.5.3.
• AWS Pricing Calculator, now generally available, supports discounts and purchase commitment – We announced the general availability of the AWS Pricing Calculator in the AWS console. You can now create more accurate and comprehensive cost estimates by providing two types of cost estimates: cost estimation for a workload, and estimation of a full AWS bill. You can also import your historical usage or create net new usage when creating a cost estimate. Additionally, with the new rate configuration inclusive of both pricing discounts and purchase commitments, you can gain a clearer picture of potential savings and cost optimizations for your cost scenarios.
• AWS CDK Toolkit Library is now generally available – AWS CDK Toolkit Library provides programmatic access to core AWS CDK functionalities such as synthesis, deployment, and destruction of stacks. You can use this library to integrate CDK operations directly into your applications, custom CLIs, and automation workflows, offering greater flexibility and control over infrastructure management.
• Announcing Red Hat Enterprise Linux for AWS – Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for AWS, starting with RHEL 10, is now generally available, combining Red Hat’s enterprise-grade Linux software with native AWS integration. RHEL for AWS is built to achieve optimum performance of RHEL running on AWS.

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

Additional updates
Here are some additional projects, blog posts, and news items that you might find interesting:

• Introducing AI on EKS: powering scalable AI workloads with Amazon EKS – AI on EKS is a new open source initiative from AWS designed to help you deploy, scale, and optimize AI/ML workloads on Amazon EKS. AI on EKS repository includes deployment-ready blueprints for distributed training, LLM inference, generative AI pipelines, multi-model serving, agentic AI, GPU and Neuron-specific benchmarks, and MLOps best practices.
• Revolutionizing earth observation with geospatial foundation models on AWS – Emerging transformer-based vision models for geospatial data—also called geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs)—offer a new and powerful technology for mapping the earth’s surface at a continental scale. This post explores how Clay Foundation’s Clay foundation model can be deployed for large-scale inference and fine-tuning on Amazon SageMaker. You can use the ready-to-deploy code samples to get started quickly with deploying GeoFMs in your own applications on AWS.

• Going beyond AI assistants: Examples from Amazon.com reinventing industries with generative AI – Non-conversational applications offer unique advantages, such as higher latency tolerance, batch processing, and caching, but their autonomous nature requires stronger guardrails and exhaustive quality assurance compared to conversational applications, which benefit from real-time user feedback and supervision. This post examines four diverse Amazon.com examples of non-conversational generative AI applications.

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

• AWS Summits – Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Stockholm (June 4), Sydney (June 4–5), Hamburg (June 5), Washington (June 10–11), Madrid (June 11), Milan (June 18), Shanghai (June 19–20), and Mumbai (June 19).
• AWS re:Inforce – Mark your calendars for AWS re:Inforce (June 16–18) in Philadelphia, PA. AWS re:Inforce is a learning conference focused on AWS security solutions, cloud security, compliance, and identity.
• 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: Milwaukee, USA (June 5), Mexico (June 14), Nairobi, Kenya (June 14), and Colombia (June 28).

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

– Prasad

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Aurora DSQL, MCP Servers, Amazon FSx, AI on EKS, and more (June 2, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.