This week, the AWS IoT Device SDK for Swift reached general availability. As a member of the Swift Server Workgroup (SSWG), this one caught my attention. The SDK brings production-ready MQTT 5 connectivity, Device Shadow, Jobs, and fleet provisioning to Swift developers on macOS, iOS, tvOS, and Linux.

I’m curious to see what you will build with it. Swift on the server has matured over the past few years, and now it reaches IoT devices too. This connects to a broader trend of running Swift at the edge. WendyOS, for example, is an open-source operating system for physical AI that offers first-class Swift support for deploying apps to NVIDIA Jetson and Raspberry Pi hardware. Between server-side Swift, IoT, and edge computing, the language is showing up in places that would have surprised most people a few years ago.

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

Headlines

Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports Bring Your Own Media — Customers who migrate SQL Server applications from on-premises environments can now reuse their existing Microsoft SQL Server licenses, including Software Assurance, through Microsoft’s License Mobility program on Amazon RDS. BYOM is integrated with AWS License Manager for tracking license usage and compliance. Read more.

Amazon Cognito now supports multi-Region replication — You can now synchronize user and machine identity data, including credentials, user pool configurations, and federation setups, to a secondary user pool in a standby Region in near real-time. In the event of a disruption in the primary Region, signed-in users continue accessing their applications without re-authenticating, and registered users can sign in with their existing credentials. Multi-Region replication is available as an add-on for user pools in Essentials or Plus feature tiers across 16 Regions. Read more.

GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4, and Codex from OpenAI are now generally available on Amazon Bedrock — You can now use GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4 in production workloads on Amazon Bedrock and build with Codex for AI-powered software development, with the same security, governance, and operational controls you already use across AWS. GPT-5.5 is the most capable model from OpenAI, excelling at agentic coding, data analysis, and multi-step autonomous tasks. Codex is available through the Codex App, the Codex CLI, and IDE integrations with Visual Studio Code, JetBrains, and Xcode. Pricing matches OpenAI first-party rates, and usage counts toward existing AWS commitments. Read more.

Last week’s launches

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

• Amazon Bedrock adds CloudWatch metrics for OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible APIs — You can now monitor inference traffic to the bedrock-mantle endpoint with CloudWatch metrics, including inference counts, input and output token totals, and client error counts at account, project, model, and project-and-model granularity.
• Amazon Bedrock launches a redesigned console optimized for OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible APIs — A refreshed console workflow with a model catalog, side-by-side comparison, project-based organization, and project-aware documentation with pre-filled code snippets.
• Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Identity now supports bring-your-own secrets with AWS Secrets Manager — Customers can now reference existing AWS Secrets Manager secret ARNs in AgentCore Identity Credential Providers, enabling full ownership of secrets governance including custom CMKs, tagging strategies, and automatic rotation.
• AWS Step Functions adds AgentCore-powered agentic reasoning step — You can now add AI agent reasoning steps to your Step Functions workflows through an integration with the managed harness in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. Run multiple agents in parallel or sequence, add human approval, and trace every agent decision.
• Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro now support Kubernetes version 1.36 — Kubernetes 1.36 promotes User Namespaces to GA, introduces Mutating Admission Policies, In-Place Pod-Level Resources Vertical Scaling, and Resource Health Status reporting. Available in all Regions where EKS is available.
• Amazon ECS Managed Instances now supports AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia — You can now create an ECS Managed Instances capacity provider with Inferentia2, Trainium1, and Trainium2 instance types and have Amazon ECS automatically allocate all accelerator resources to your workload.
• Amazon Quick now supports VPC connectivity for MCP connections — Enterprise customers can now connect privately hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to Amazon Quick through VPC, enabling secure access to proprietary applications and internal tools without exposing them to the internet.
• AWS Cost and Usage Report 2.0 now supports Athena and Redshift integration — CUR 2.0 exports are automatically delivered in the optimal format for your chosen query engine, with supporting infrastructure templates, table definitions, and data loading instructions.
• Amazon Location Service announces public transit and intermodal routing — The Routes API now supports two new travel modes, Transit and Intermodal, to plan journeys combining public transportation with walking, driving, taxi, and rental segments across 13 Regions.

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

Upcoming AWS events

Learn more about AWS, browse and join upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, startup events, and developer-focused events as well as AWS Summits and AWS Community Days. Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development.

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

— seb

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: BYOM for Amazon RDS for SQL Server, AWS IoT Device SDK for Swift, and more (June 8, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Next week, don’t miss AWS re:Invent, Dec. 1-5, 2025, for the latest AWS news, expert insights, and global cloud community connections! Our News Blog team is finalizing posts to introduce the most exciting launches from our service teams. If you’re joining us in person in Las Vegas, review the agenda, session catalog, and attendee guides before arriving. Can’t attend in person? Watch our Keynotes and Innovation Talks via livestream.

Kiro is now generally available

Last week, Kiro, the first AI coding tool built around spec-driven development, became generally available. This tool, which we pioneered to bring more clarity and structure to agentic workflows, has already been embraced by over 250,000 developers since its preview release. The GA launch introduces four new capabilities: property-based testing for spec correctness (which measures whether your code matches what you specified); a new way to checkpoint your progress on Kiro; a new Kiro CLI bringing agents to your terminal; and enterprise team plans with centralized management.

Last week’s launches

We’ve announced numerous new feature and service launches as we approach re:Invent week. Key launches include:

Here are some AWS bundled feature launches:

• Amazon EKS announces new Provisioned Control Plane, and fully managed MCP servers (preview) and enhanced AI-powered troubleshooting in the console with Amazon ECS.
• Amazon ECR introduces managed container image signing, archive storage class for rarely accessed container images, and AWS PrivateLink for FIPS Endpoints.
• Amazon Aurora DSQL provides an integrated query editor in the console, statement-level cost estimates in query plans, new Python, Node.js, and JDBC Connectors, up to 256 TiB of storage volume.
• Amazon API Gateway supports response streaming for REST APIs, developer portal capabilities, and additional TLS security policies for REST APIs.
• Amazon Connect provides conversational analytics for voice, persistent agent connections for faster call handling, and multi skill agent scheduling.
• Amazon CloudWatch introduces scheduled queries in Logs Insights and in-console agent management on EC2.
• AWS CloudFormation StackSets offers deployment ordering for auto-deployment mode. You can define the sequence in which your stack instances automatically deploy across accounts and Regions.
• AWS NAT Gateway supports Regional availability to create a single NAT Gateway that automatically expands and contracts across availability zones (AZs).
• Amazon Bedrock supports OpenAI GPT OSS models for Custom Model Import, coding use cases for Guardrails, and 10 additional languages for speech analytics for Data Automation.
• Amazon OpenSearch supports Cluster Insights for improved operational visibility, backup and restore and audit logs for data plane APIs in Serverless through the console.

See AWS What’s New for more launch news that I haven’t covered here, and we’ll see you next week at re:Invent!

– Channy

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: How to join AWS re:Invent 2025, plus Kiro GA, and lots of launches (Nov 24, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, I’m excited to announce enhanced local testing capabilities for AWS Step Functions through the TestState API, our testing API.

These enhancements are available through the API, so you can build automated test suites that validate your workflow definitions locally on your development machines, test error handling patterns, data transformations, and mock service integrations using your preferred testing frameworks. This launch introduces an API-based approach for local unit testing, providing programmatic access to comprehensive testing capabilities without deploying to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

There are three key capabilities introduced in this enhanced TestState API:

• Mocking support – Mock state outputs and errors without invoking downstream services, enabling true unit testing of state machine logic. TestState validates mocked responses against AWS API models with three validation modes: STRICT (this is the default and validates all required fields), PRESENT (validates field types and names), and NONE (no validation), providing high-fidelity testing.

• Read moreHTML Element: select | Envato Tuts+

  Support for all state types – All state types, including advanced states such as Map states (inline and distributed), Parallel states, activity-based Task states, .sync service integration patterns, and .waitForTaskToken service integration patterns, can now be tested. This means you can use TestState API across your entire workflow definition and write unit tests to verify control flow logic, including state transitions, error handling, and data transformations.

• Testing individual states – Test specific states within a full state machine definition using the new stateName parameter. You can provide the complete state machine definition one time and test each state individually by name. You can control execution context to test specific retry attempts, Map iteration positions, and error scenarios.

Getting started with enhanced TestState

Let me walk you through these new capabilities in enhanced TestState.

Scenario 1: Mock successful results

The first capability is mocking support, which you can use to test your workflow logic without invoking actual AWS services or even external HTTP requests. You can either mock service responses for fast unit testing or test with actual AWS services for integration testing. When using mocked responses, you don’t need AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions.

Here’s how to mock a successful AWS Lambda function response:

aws stepfunctions test-state --region us-east-1 
--definition '{
  "Type": "Task",
  "Resource": "arn:aws:states:::lambda:invoke",
  "Parameters": {"FunctionName": "process-order"},
  "End": true
}' 
--mock '{"result":"{"orderId":"12345","status":"processed"}"}' 
--inspection-level DEBUG

This command tests a Lambda invocation state without actually calling the function. TestState validates your mock response against the Lambda service API model so your test data matches what the real service would return.

The response shows the successful execution with detailed inspection data (when using DEBUG inspection level):

{
    "output": "{"orderId":"12345","status":"processed"}",
    "inspectionData": {
        "input": "{}",
        "afterInputPath": "{}",
        "afterParameters": "{"FunctionName":"process-order"}",
        "result": "{"orderId":"12345","status":"processed"}",
        "afterResultSelector": "{"orderId":"12345","status":"processed"}",
        "afterResultPath": "{"orderId":"12345","status":"processed"}"
    },
    "status": "SUCCEEDED"
}

When you specify a mock response, TestState validates it against the AWS service’s API model so your mocked data conforms to the expected schema, maintaining high-fidelity testing without requiring actual AWS service calls.

Scenario 2: Mock error conditions

You can also mock error conditions to test your error handling logic:

aws stepfunctions test-state --region us-east-1 
--definition '{
  "Type": "Task",
  "Resource": "arn:aws:states:::lambda:invoke",
  "Parameters": {"FunctionName": "process-order"},
  "End": true
}' 
--mock '{"errorOutput":{"error":"Lambda.ServiceException","cause":"Function failed"}}' 
--inspection-level DEBUG

This simulates a Lambda service exception so you can verify how your state machine handles failures without triggering actual errors in your AWS environment.

The response shows the failed execution with error details:

{
    "error": "Lambda.ServiceException",
    "cause": "Function failed",
    "inspectionData": {
        "input": "{}",
        "afterInputPath": "{}",
        "afterParameters": "{"FunctionName":"process-order"}"
    },
    "status": "FAILED"
}

Scenario 3: Test Map states

The second capability adds support for previously unsupported state types. Here’s how to test a Distributed Map state:

aws stepfunctions test-state --region us-east-1 
--definition '{
  "Type": "Map",
  "ItemProcessor": {
    "ProcessorConfig": {"Mode": "DISTRIBUTED", "ExecutionType": "STANDARD"},
    "StartAt": "ProcessItem",
    "States": {
      "ProcessItem": {
        "Type": "Task", 
        "Resource": "arn:aws:states:::lambda:invoke",
        "Parameters": {"FunctionName": "process-item"},
        "End": true
      }
    }
  },
  "End": true
}' 
--input '[{"itemId":1},{"itemId":2}]' 
--mock '{"result":"[{"itemId":1,"status":"processed"},{"itemId":2,"status":"processed"}]"}' 
--inspection-level DEBUG

The mock result represents the complete output from processing multiple items. In this case, the mocked array must match the expected Map state output format.

The response shows successful processing of the array input:

{
    "output": "[{"itemId":1,"status":"processed"},{"itemId":2,"status":"processed"}]",
    "inspectionData": {
        "input": "[{"itemId":1},{"itemId":2}]",
        "afterInputPath": "[{"itemId":1},{"itemId":2}]",
        "afterResultSelector": "[{"itemId":1,"status":"processed"},{"itemId":2,"status":"processed"}]",
        "afterResultPath": "[{"itemId":1,"status":"processed"},{"itemId":2,"status":"processed"}]"
    },
    "status": "SUCCEEDED"
}

Scenario 4: Test Parallel states

Similarly, you can test Parallel states that execute multiple branches concurrently:

aws stepfunctions test-state --region us-east-1 
--definition '{
  "Type": "Parallel",
  "Branches": [
    {"StartAt": "Branch1", "States": {"Branch1": {"Type": "Pass", "End": true}}},
    {"StartAt": "Branch2", "States": {"Branch2": {"Type": "Pass", "End": true}}}
  ],
  "End": true
}' 
--mock '{"result":"[{"branch1":"data1"},{"branch2":"data2"}]"}' 
--inspection-level DEBUG

The mock result must be an array with one element per branch. By using TestState, your mock data structure matches what a real Parallel state execution would produce.

The response shows the parallel execution results:

{
    "output": "[{"branch1":"data1"},{"branch2":"data2"}]",
    "inspectionData": {
        "input": "{}",
        "afterResultSelector": "[{"branch1":"data1"},{"branch2":"data2"}]",
        "afterResultPath": "[{"branch1":"data1"},{"branch2":"data2"}]"
    },
    "status": "SUCCEEDED"
}

Scenario 5: Test individual states within complete workflows

You can test specific states within a full state machine definition using the stateName parameter. Here’s an example testing a single state, though you would typically provide your complete workflow definition and specify which state to test:

aws stepfunctions test-state --region us-east-1 
--definition '{
  "Type": "Task",
  "Resource": "arn:aws:states:::lambda:invoke",
  "Parameters": {"FunctionName": "validate-order"},
  "End": true
}' 
--input '{"orderId":"12345","amount":99.99}' 
--mock '{"result":"{"orderId":"12345","validated":true}"}' 
--inspection-level DEBUG

This tests a Lambda invocation state with specific input data, showing how TestState processes the input and transforms it through the state execution.

The response shows detailed input processing and validation:

{
    "output": "{"orderId":"12345","validated":true}",
    "inspectionData": {
        "input": "{"orderId":"12345","amount":99.99}",
        "afterInputPath": "{"orderId":"12345","amount":99.99}",
        "afterParameters": "{"FunctionName":"validate-order"}",
        "result": "{"orderId":"12345","validated":true}",
        "afterResultSelector": "{"orderId":"12345","validated":true}",
        "afterResultPath": "{"orderId":"12345","validated":true}"
    },
    "status": "SUCCEEDED"
}

These enhancements bring the familiar local development experience to Step Functions workflows, helping me to get instant feedback on changes before deploying to my AWS account. I can write automated test suites to validate all Step Functions features with the same reliability as cloud execution, providing confidence that my workflows will work as expected when deployed.

Things to know

Here are key points to note:

• Availability – Enhanced TestState capabilities are available in all AWS Regions where Step Functions is supported.
• Pricing – TestState API calls are included with AWS Step Functions at no additional charge.
• Framework compatibility – TestState works with any testing framework that can make HTTP requests, including Jest, pytest, JUnit, and others. You can write test suites that validate your workflows automatically in your continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline before deployment.
• Feature support – Enhanced TestState supports all Step Functions features including Distributed Map, Parallel states, error handling, and JSONata expressions.
• Documentation – For detailed options for different configurations, refer to the TestState documentation and API reference for the updated request and response model.

Get started today with enhanced local testing by integrating TestState into your development workflow.

Happy building!

— Donnie

The post Accelerate workflow development with enhanced local testing in AWS Step Functions appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last week I met Jeff Barr at the AWS Shenzhen Community Day. Jeff shared stories about how builders around the world are experimenting with generative AI and encouraged local developers to keep pushing ideas into real prototypes. Many attendees stayed after the sessions to discuss model grounding, evaluation, and how to bring generative AI into real applications.

Community builders showcased creative Kiro-themed demos, AI-powered IoT projects, and student-led experiments. It was inspiring to see new developers, students, and long-time Amazon Web Services (AWS) community leaders connecting over shared curiosity and excitement for generative AI innovation.

Project Rainier, one of the world’s most powerful operational AI supercomputers is now online. Built by AWS in close collaboration with Anthropic, Project Rainier brings nearly 500,000 AWS custom-designed Trainium2 chips into service using a new Amazon Elastic Compute (Amazon EC2) UltraServer and EC2 UltraCluster architecture designed for high-bandwidth, low-latency model training at hyperscale.

Anthropic is already training and running inference for Claude on Project Rainier, and is expected to scale to more than one million Trainium2 chips across direct usage and Amazon Bedrock by the end of 2025. For architecture details, deployment insights, and behind-the-scenes video of an UltraServer coming online, refer to AWS activates Project Rainier for the full announcement.

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

• Amazon Nova – Adds Web Grounding as a new built-in tool for real-time, citation-based web retrieval, and introduces Multimodal Embeddings, a state-of-the-art model that produces unified cross-modal vectors, improving accuracy for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and semantic search. Both capabilities are available in Amazon Bedrock.
• Amazon Bedrock – TwelveLabs’ Marengo Embed 3.0 is now available for long-form, video-native multimodal embeddings across video, images, audio, and text with improved domain accuracy. Stability AI Image Services added four new tools: Outpaint, Fast Upscale, Conservative Upscale, and Creative Upscale for high-resolution upscaling, outpainting, and controlled variations.
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) Proxy for AWS – Now generally available as a client-side proxy that connects MCP clients to remote AWS hosted MCP servers using SigV4 authentication. It works with tools like Amazon Q Developer CLI, Kiro, Cursor, and Strands Agents, and provides safety controls such as read-only mode, retry logic, and logging. The Proxy is open-source. You can visit the AWS GitHub repository to view the installation and configuration options and start connecting with remote AWS MCP servers.
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) – Now supports built-in linear and canary deployment strategies, providing gradual traffic shifting, canary testing with small production slices, deployment bake times for safe rollback, and Amazon CloudWatch alarm-based automated rollbacks.
• Amazon DocumentDB – Adds a new query planner in Amazon DocumentDB 5.0 that delivers up to 10 times faster query performance with more optimal index plans and support for $neq, $nin, and nested $elementMatch, and can be enabled through cluster parameter groups without downtime.
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) – You can now use new per-volume CloudWatch metrics, VolumeAvgIOPS and VolumeAvgThroughput, to get minute-level visibility into average IOPS and throughput for EBS volumes on AWS Nitro based instances. These metrics help monitor performance trends, troubleshoot bottlenecks, and optimize provisioned capacity.
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams – You can now send individual records up to 10 MiB, a tenfold increase from the previous limit, helping support larger Internet of Things (IoT), change data capture (CDC), and AI-generated payloads.
  Amazon SageMaker – Unified Studio search results now provide additional search context, showing matched metadata fields and ranking rationale to improve transparency and relevance in data discovery.

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

• Building production-ready 3D pipelines with AWS VAMS and 4D Pipeline – A reference architecture for creating scalable, cloud-based 3D asset pipelines using AWS Visual Asset Management System (VAMS) and 4D Pipeline, supporting ingest, validation, collaborative review, and distribution across games, visual effects (VFX), and digital twins.
• Amazon Location Service introduces new API key restrictions – You can now create granular security policies with bundle IDs to restrict API access to specific mobile applications, improving access control and strengthening application-level security across location-based workloads.
• AWS Clean Rooms launches advanced SQL configurations – A performance enhancement for Spark SQL workloads that supports runtime customization of Spark properties and compute sizes, plus table caching for faster and more cost-efficient processing of large analytical queries.
• AWS Serverless MCP Server adds event source mappings (ESM) tools – A capability for event-driven serverless applications that supports configuration, performance tuning, and troubleshooting of AWS Lambda event source mappings, including AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) template generation and diagnostic insights.
• AWS IoT Greengrass releases an AI agent context pack – A development accelerator for cloud-connected edge applications that provides ready-to-use instructions, examples, and templates, helping teams integrate generative AI tools such as Amazon Q for faster software creation, testing, and fleet-wide deployment. It’s available as open source on the GitHub repository.
• AWS Step Functions introduces a new metrics dashboard – You can now view usage, billing, and performance metrics at the state-machine level for standard and express workflows in a single console view, improving visibility and troubleshooting for distributed applications.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars so that you can sign up for these upcoming events:

• AWS Builder Loft – A community tech space in San Francisco where you can learn from expert sessions, join hands-on workshops, explore AI and emerging technologies, and collaborate with other builders to accelerate their ideas. Browse the upcoming sessions and join the events that interest you.
• AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by experienced AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Hong Kong (November 2), Abuja (November 8), Cameroon (November 8), and Spain (November 15).
• AWS Skills Center Seattle 4th Anniversary Celebration – A free, public event on November 20 with a keynote, learned panels, recruiter insights, raffles, and virtual participation options.

Join the AWS Builder Center to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community. Browse here for upcoming in-person events, developer-focused events, and events for startups.

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

– Betty

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Project Rainier online, Amazon Nova, Amazon Bedrock, and more (November 3, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Three weeks ago, I published a post about the new AWS Region in New Zealand (ap-southeast-6). This led to an incredible opportunity to visit New Zealand, where I met passionate builders and presented at several events including Serverless and Platform Engineering meetup, AWS Tools and Programming meetup, AWS Cloud Clubs in Auckland, and AWS Community Day New Zealand.

During my content creation process for these presentations, I discovered a useful feature in Amazon Q CLI called tangent mode. This feature has transformed how I stay focused by creating conversation checkpoints that let you explore side topics without losing your main thread.

This feature is in experimental mode, and you can enable it with q settings chat.enableTangentMode true. Try it out and see if it helps you.

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

• New Foundation Models in Amazon Bedrock — Amazon Bedrock expands its model selection with Qwen model family, DeepSeek-V3.1, and Stability AI image services now generally available, giving developers access to powerful multilingual models and advanced image generation capabilities for text generation, code generation, image creation, and complex problem-solving tasks.
• Amazon VPC Reachability Analyzer Expands to Seven New Regions — Network Access Analyzer capabilities are now available in additional regions, helping customers analyze and troubleshoot network connectivity issues across their VPC infrastructure with improved global coverage.
• Amazon Q Developer Supports Remote MCP Servers — Amazon Q Developer now integrates with remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, enabling developers to extend their AI assistant capabilities with custom tools and data sources for enhanced development workflows.
• AWS Step Functions Enhances Distributed Map with New Data Source Options — Step Functions introduces additional data source options and improved observability features for Distributed Map, making it easier to process large-scale parallel workloads with better monitoring and debugging capabilities.
• Amazon Corretto 25 Generally Available — Amazon’s no-cost, multiplatform distribution of OpenJDK 25 is now generally available, providing Java developers with long-term support, performance enhancements, and security updates for building modern applications.
• Amazon SageMaker HyperPod Introduces Autoscaling — SageMaker HyperPod now supports automatic scaling capabilities, allowing machine learning teams to dynamically adjust compute resources based on workload demands, optimizing both performance and cost for distributed training jobs.

Additional Updates

• AWS Named Leader in 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for AI Code Assistants – AWS has been recognized as a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for AI Code Assistants, highlighting Amazon Q Developer’s capabilities in helping developers write code faster and more securely with AI-powered suggestions.
• Become an AWS Cloud Club Captain – Only a couple of days before it closes! 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 build cloud communities while developing leadership skills. The 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 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 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: South Africa (September 20), Bolivia (September 20), Portugal (September 27), and Manila (October 4-5).

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!

Happy building!

— Donnie

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Q Developer, AWS Step Functions, AWS Cloud Club Captain deadline, and more (September 22, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

I want to introduce the AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day to provide a comprehensive showcase of latest innovations in AWS cloud infrastructure. This event will highlight cutting-edge advances across compute, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), storage solutions, networking capabilities, serverless, and accelerated technologies, and global infrastructure.

Join us for AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day, a free-to-attend one-day virtual event on May 22, 2025, starting at 11:00 AM PDT (2:00 PM EDT). We will stream the event simultaneously across multiple platforms, including LinkedIn Live, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch.

Here are some of the highlights you can expect from this event:

Willem Visser, VP of EC2 Technology will open with the introduction of the AWS journey since 2006, when Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) was launched with the goal of customer-obsessed innovation. He will speak about the progress made over nearly two decades in cloud infrastructure to support both startups and enterprise workloads based on scale, capacity, and flexibility.

You can learn how AWS developed beyond computing instances to create a complete cloud infrastructure, including the parallel evolution of services like storage and networking capabilities.

Todd Kennedy, Principal Engineer, GoDaddy, will share GoDaddy’s Graviton adoption journey and the benefits it reaped from Graviton. Todd will walk through an example to demonstrate moving Rust workloads to Graviton. Learn how GoDaddy achieved 40 percent compute cost savings and over 20 percent performance gains.

This event covers a variety of topics related to AWS Cloud infrastructure. Here are interesting topics that caught my interest:

• Generative AI at the edge – You can learn how to select, fine-tune, and deploy small language models (SLMs) for on-premises and edge use cases due to data residency requirements using AWS hybrid and edge services.
• Serverless for agentic AI auditability – You can learn how AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda transform opaque agentic AI system operations into transparent, auditable workflows.
• Accelerated computing – You can get a close look at AWS innovation across silicon, server, and data centers and learn how customers are using AI chips. Learn how you can get started and reduce your generative AI costs.
• Networking capability – You can learn how AWS infrastructure—from physical fiber to software-defined networking—enables unparalleled performance and reliability at global scale. The session covers modern application networking patterns while emphasizing secure connectivity solutions for hybrid environments.

This event is perfect for technical decision-makers and developers and offers deep technical insights and hands-on demonstrations of the latest AWS Cloud infrastructure solutions.

To learn more details, review the event schedule and register for AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day.

— Channy

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The post Join AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day to learn cutting-edge innovations building global cloud infrastructure appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit 2025 season launched this week, starting with the Paris Summit. These free events bring together the global cloud computing community for learning and collaboration. AWS Community Day Romania, held on April 11th, showcased how the local community creates opportunities for collective growth and inclusion.

Last week’s launches
Announcing up to 85% price reductions for Amazon S3 Express One Zone — S3 Express One Zone, a high-performance storage class, now has reduced storage prices by 31 percent, PUT request prices by 55 percent, and GET request prices by 85 percent. In addition, S3 Express One Zone has reduced the per-GB charges for data uploads and retrievals by 60 percent. These charges now apply to all bytes transferred rather than just portions of requests greater than 512 KB.

Here is a price reduction table in the US East (N. Virginia) AWS Region:

AWS announces Pixtral Large 25.02 model in Amazon Bedrock serverless — The Pixtral Large 25.02, developed by Mistral AI, combines advanced vision and language understanding, boasting a 128K context window and multilingual capabilities. This agent-centric design simplifies integration with existing systems. Prompt adherence improves reliability when working with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) applications and large context scenarios.

Introducing Amazon Nova Sonic: Human-like voice conversations for generative AI applications — Amazon Nova Sonic, the newest addition to the Amazon Nova family of foundation models (FMs) is available in Amazon Bedrock to create human-like voice conversations for applications. It unifies speech and text processing into one model, reducing complexity and enhancing natural interactions. Start today with the Amazon Nova model cookbook repository.

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails enhances generative AI application safety with new capabilities — Amazon Bedrock Guardrails introduces new capabilities to enhance generative AI application safety, including multimodal toxicity detection, enhanced Personally Identifiable Information (PII) protection, AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) policy enforcement, selective guardrail application, and monitor mode for pre-deployment analysis.

AWS App Studio introduces a prebuilt solutions catalog and cross-instance Import and Export — This is a prebuilt solutions catalog with ready-to-use applications and patterns and cross-instance Import and Export functionality. These features help you streamline development applications, reducing setup time to under 15 minutes. Learn more about this in AWS App Studio introduces a prebuilt solutions catalog and cross-instance Import and Export blog.

Amazon Nova Reel 1.1: Featuring up to 2-minutes multi-shot videos — Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 enhances video generation through Amazon Bedrock with support for 2-minute multi-shot videos. You can now create content using either single prompts for automatic generation or custom prompts for individual shots, offering flexible options for marketing and social media content creation.

AWS IAM Identity Center now offers improved error messages and AWS CloudTrail logging for provisioning issues — AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Identity Center has enhanced its service with improved error messages and AWS CloudTrail logging capabilities. These updates help users better troubleshoot synchronization issues when managing workforce identities across AWS accounts and applications, while enabling automated monitoring and auditing of provisioning problems.

AWS WAF Console adds new top insights visualizations in additional regions — AWS WAF Console now offers enhanced traffic visualization features in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The all traffic dashboard includes new top insights based on Amazon CloudWatch logs, helping customers analyze traffic patterns, identify security threats, and optimize WAF configurations through detailed metrics.

AWS Step Functions expands data source and output options for Distributed Map — AWS Step Functions enhances Distributed Map with expanded data source support, including JSONL and various delimited file formats from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The update also adds new output transformation options, enabling more flexible parallel processing workflows and better integration with downstream systems.

Amazon CloudWatch now provides lock contention diagnostics for Aurora PostgreSQL — Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights introduces lock contention diagnostics for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL in Advanced mode. The feature visualizes blocking and waiting sessions, helping users identify root causes of lock contention issues, with 15-month historical data retention for comprehensive troubleshooting.

Get updated with all the announcements of AWS announcements on the What’s New with AWS? page.

Other AWS blog posts
Reduce ML training costs with Amazon SageMaker HyperPod — Amazon SageMaker HyperPod addresses hardware failures in large-scale Machine Learning (ML) model training by automatically detecting and replacing faulty instances. The solution reduces downtime from 280 to 40 minutes per failure, potentially saving 32% of training time for large clusters. For a 10-million GPU-hour training job, this translates to $25.6M in cost savings.

Model customization, RAG, or both: A case study with Amazon Nova — A study comparing model customization with fine-tuning and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches with Amazon Nova models. Key findings show combining both methods yields best results: RAG works well for dynamic data and domain insights, while fine-tuning excels in specialized tasks and latency reduction.

Generate user-personalized communication with Amazon Personalize and Amazon Bedrock — Amazon Personalize and Amazon Bedrock work together to create personalized marketing emails. Learn how to create personalized user communications by combining Amazon Personalize for movie recommendations with Amazon Bedrock for generating tailored email content based on user preferences and demographics.

Implement human-in-the-loop confirmation with Amazon Bedrock Agents — When implementing human validation in Amazon Bedrock Agents, developers have two primary frameworks at their disposal: user confirmation and return of control (ROC). Using an HR application example, user confirmation allows simple yes/no validation before executing actions, while ROC enables users to modify parameters before execution.

Multi-LLM routing strategies for generative AI applications on AWS — Learn how to implement multi-Large Language Model (LLM) routing strategies for AWS generative AI applications using static routing, dynamic routing with Amazon Bedrock, or custom solutions for optimal model selection and cost efficiency.

Here are my personal favorites posts from community.aws:

Building a RAG System for Video Content Search and Analysis — In this blog, I’ll show you how to build a RAG system that makes video content searchable and analyzable. Unlocking video content has never been more crucial in today’s digital landscape. Whether you’re managing educational materials, corporate training, or entertainment content, the ability to search and analyze video content efficiently can transform how we interact with multimedia resources.

Build Serverless GenAI Apps Faster with Amazon Q Developer CLI Agent — Amazon Q Developer CLI Agent enables rapid serverless GenAI app development. With one prompt, it generates infrastructure code, Lambda functions, and integrates with Claude 3 Haiku on Amazon Bedrock.

Speech-to-Speech AI: From Dr. Sbaitso to Amazon Nova Sonic — The evolution of speech-to-speech AI, from Dr. Sbaitso (1990s) to Amazon Nova Sonic. New AWS service enables real-time bidirectional conversations through Amazon Bedrock for more natural applications.

Setup Model Context Protocol (MCP) using Amazon Bedrock — A guide to setting up Model Context Protocol (MCP) desktop client with Amazon Bedrock models, enabling seamless integration between AI applications and external tools using Goose client.

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

AWS GenAI Lofts — GenAI Lofts available around the world, offer collaborative spaces and immersive experiences for startups and developers. You can join in-person GenAI Loft San Francisco events such as GenAI in EdTech: A Hands-On Workshop (April 15), and Unstructured Data Meetup SF (April 16). Find your nearest event at GenAI Lofts.

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

AWS re:Inforce — AWS re:Inforce (June 16–18) in Philadelphia, PA, is our annual learning event devoted to all things AWS cloud security. Registration is open. Be ready to join more than 5,000 security builders and leaders.

AWS Community Days — Join community-led conferences featuring technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs driven by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world. Upcoming AWS Community Days are scheduled for April 19 in Turkey, and on April 29 in Prague with Jeff Barr as Opening Keynote Speaker.

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

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

That’s all for this week. Stay tuned for next week’s Weekly Roundup!

— Eli

Thanks to Andra Somesan for the AWS Community Romania photo and Thembile Martis for the AWS Paris Summit photo.

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

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

The post AWS Weekly Review: Amazon S3 Express One Zone price cuts, Pixtral Large on Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Nova Sonic, and more (April 14, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

As the weather improves in the Northern hemisphere, there are more opportunities to learn and connect. This week, I’ll be in San Francisco, and we can meet at the Nova Networking Night at the AWS GenAI Loft where we’ll dive into the world of Amazon Nova foundation models (FMs) with live demos and real-world implementations.

AWS Pi Day is now a yearly tradition. It started in 2021 as a celebration of the 15th anniversary of Amazon S3. This year, there will be in-depth discussions with AWS product teams on how to build a data foundation for a unified seamless experience, managing and using data for analytics and AI workloads. Join us online to learn about the latest innovations through hands-on demos, and ask questions during our interactive livestream.

Last week’s launches
Another busy week, here are the launches that got my attention.

Amazon Q Developer – You can now use an enhanced agent within the Amazon Q command line interface (CLI) to give you more dynamic conversations, help you read and write files locally, query AWS resources, or create code. This enhanced CLI agent is powered by Anthropic’s most intelligent model to date, Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Read more about this agenic coding experience and how to try it out. Here’s a visual demo of the new capabilities of Amazon Q CLI, by Nathan Peck.

Amazon Q Business – Now supports the ingestion of audio and video data. This capability streamlines information retrieval, enhances knowledge sharing, and improves decision-making processes, by making multimedia content as searchable and accessible as text-based documents.

Amazon Bedrock – Bedrock Data Automation is now generally available, so you can automate the generation of valuable insights from unstructured multimodal content such as documents, images, video, and audio files. Learn more and see code examples in my blog post. Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases support for GraphRAG is now also generally available. GraphRAG is a capability that enhances Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by incorporating graph data and delivers more comprehensive, relevant, and explainable responses by leveraging relationships within your data, improving how Generative AI applications retrieve and synthesize information.

Amazon Nova – The Amazon Nova Pro foundation model now supports latency-optimized inference in preview on Amazon Bedrock, enabling faster response times and improved responsiveness for generative AI applications.

AWS Step Functions – Workflow Studio for VS Code is now available, a visual builder you can use to compose workflows on a canvas. You can generate workflow definitions in the background to create workflows in your local development environment. Read more about this enhanced local IDE experience.

AWS Lambda – Now supports Amazon CloudWatch Logs Live Tail in VS Code. We previously introduced support for Live Tail in the Lambda console to simplify how you can view and analyze Lambda logs in real time. Now, you can also monitor Lambda function logs in real time while staying within the VS Code development environment.

AWS Amplify – Now supports HttpOnly cookies for server-rendered Next.js applications when using Amazon Cognito’s managed login. Because cookies with the HttpOnly attribute can’t be accessed by JavaScript, your applications can gain an additional layer of protection against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

Amazon Cognito – You can now customize access tokens for machine-to-machine (M2M) flows, enabling you to implement fine-grained authorization in your applications, APIs, and workloads. M2M authorization is commonly used for automated processes such as scheduled data synchronization tasks, event-driven workflows, microservices communication, or real-time data streaming between systems.

AWS CodeBuild – Now supports builds on Linux x86, Arm, and Windows on-demand fleets directly on the host operating system without containerization. In this way, you can now execute build commands that require direct access to the host system resources or have specific requirements that make containerization challenging. For example, this is useful when building device drivers, running system-level tests, or working with tools that require host machine access. CodeBuild has also added support for Node 22, Python 3.13, and Go 1.23 in Linux x86, Arm, Windows, and macOS platforms.

Bottlerocket – The open source Linux-based operating system purpose-built for containers now supports NVIDIA’s Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) to help partition NVIDIA GPUs into multiple GPU instances on Kubernetes nodes and maximize GPU resource utilization. Bottlerocket now also supports AWS Neuron accelerated instance types and provides a default bootstrap container image that simplifies system setup tasks.

Amazon GameLift – Introducing Amazon GameLift Streams, a new managed capability that developers can use to stream games at up to 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second to any device with a WebRTC-enabled browser. To learn more, explore Donnie’s blog post.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP – Starting March 5, 2025, the SnapLock licensing fees for data stored in SnapLock volumes has been eliminated, making it more cost-effective.

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

Accelerate AWS Well-Architected reviews with Generative AI – In this post, we explore a generative AI solution to streamline the Well-Architected Framework Reviews (WAFRs) process. We demonstrate how to build an intelligent, scalable system that analyzes architecture documents and generates insightful recommendations based on best practices.

Build a Multi-Agent System with LangGraph and Mistral on AWS – The Multi-Agent City Information System demonstrated in this post exemplifies the potential of agent-based architectures to create sophisticated, adaptable, and highly capable AI applications.

Evaluate RAG responses with Amazon Bedrock, LlamaIndex and RAGAS – How to enhance your Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) implementations with practical techniques to evaluate and optimize your AI systems and enable more accurate, context-aware responses that align with your specific needs.

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

Optimize AWS Lambda Costs with Automated Compute Optimizer Insights (Zechariah Kasina) – An automated and scalable method for optimizing AWS Lambda memory configurations to enhance cost efficiency and performance.

Optimize AWS Costs: Auto-Shutdown for EC2 Instances (Adeleke Adebowale Julius) – Using Amazon CloudWatch alarms to dynamically shut down instances based on inactivity.

The Evolution of the Developer Role in an AI-Assisted Future (Aaron Sempf) – While AI is transforming software development, the need for developing talent remains crucial.

Amazon Q Developer CLI – More coffee, less remembering commands (Cobus Bernard) – Now that you can use Amazon Q Developer directly from your terminal to interact with your files, so let’s add some convenience automations.

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

AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Milan, Italy (April 2), Bay Area – Security Edition (April 4), Timișoara, Romania (April 10), and Prague, Czech Republic (April 29).

AWS Innovate: Generative AI + Data – Join a free online conference focusing on generative AI and data innovations. Available in multiple geographic regions: North America (March 13), Greater China Region (March 14), and Latin America (April 8).

AWS Summits – The AWS Summit season is coming along! Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Paris (April 9), Amsterdam (April 16), London (April 30), and Poland (May 5).

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

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

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

– Danilo

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

—

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

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Q CLI agent, AWS Step Functions, AWS Lambda, and more (March 10, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

We are well settled into 2025 by now, but many people are still catching up with all the exciting new releases and announcements that came out of re:Invent last year. There have been hundreds of re:Invent recap events around the world since the beginning of the year, including in-person all-day official AWS events with multiple tracks to help you discover and dive deeper into the releases you care about, as well as community and virtual events.

Last month, I was lucky to be a co-host for AWS EMEA re:Invent re:Cap which was a nearly 4-hour livestream with experts featuring demos, whiteboard sessions, and a live Q&A. The good news is that you can now watch it on-demand! We had a great team and thousands of people enjoyed learning through the virtual experience. I recommend you check it out or share it with colleagues who have not been able to attend any re:Invent re:Cap events.

The Korean team also did an amazing job hosting their own virtual re:Invent re:Cap event, and it’s also now available on-demand. So if you speak Korean I do recommend you check it out.

If you’re more of a reader, then we have a treat for you. You can download the full official re:Invent re:Cap deck with all the slides covering releases across all areas by visiting community.aws! While there, you can also check all the upcoming in-person re:Invent re:Cap community events remaining across the globe for a chance to still attend one of those in a city near you.

But as we know, new releases, announcements, and updates don’t stop at re:Invent. Every week there are even more, and this is why we have this Weekly Roundup series that you can read every Monday to get the AWS news highlights from the week before.

So here’s what caught my attention last week.

Last week’s AWS Launches
If you use AWS Step Functions you may be interested in these:

Amazon Q Developer also got a couple of updates:

Here are some other releases that caught my attention this week from a variety of other AWS services:

AWS CloudFormation introduces stack refactoring – You can now split your CloudFormation stacks, move resources from one stack to another, and change the logical name of resources within the same stack. This adds a lot of flexibility enabling you to keep up with changes within your organization and architectures, such as streamlining resource lifecycle management for existing stacks, keeping up with naming convention changes, and other cases. You can refactor your stacks by using the AWS command line interface (CLI) or AWS SDK.

AWS Config now supports 4 new release types – AWS Config is great for monitoring resources across your AWS environment and help you towards ensuring alignment with your company and security policies as well as compliance requirements. It now has four new types of resources enabling you to monitor Amazon VPC block public access settings, any exceptions made within those settings, as well as monitor S3 Express One Zone bucket policies and directory bucket settings.

Automated recovery of Microsoft SQL Server on EC2 instan ces with VSS – You can now use a new feature called Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) to backup Microsoft SQL Server databases to Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots while the database is running. You can then use AWS Systems Manager Automation Runbook to set a recovery point of time of your preference and it will restore the database automatically from your VSS-based EBS snapshot without incurring any downtime.

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

Other updates
Upcoming changes to the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) global endpoint – To help improve the resiliency and performance of your applications, we are making changes to the AWS STS global endpoint (https://sts.amazonaws.com), with no action required from customers. Starting in early 2025, requests to the STS global endpoint will be automatically served in the same Region as your AWS deployed workloads. For example, if your application calls sts.amazonaws.com from the US West (Oregon) Region, your calls will be served locally in the US West (Oregon) Region instead of being served by the US East (N. Virginia) Region. These changes will be released in the coming weeks and we will gradually roll it out to AWS Regions that are enabled by default by mid-2025.

Looking for some reading recommendations? At the beginning of every year Dr. Werner Vogles, VP and CTO of Amazon, publishes a list of recommended books that he believes should have your attention. This year’s list is looking particularly good in my opinion!

Upcoming AWS and community events
AWS Public Sector Day London, February 27 — Join public sector leaders and innovators to explore how AWS is enabling digital transformation in government, education, and healthcare.

AWS Innovate GenAI + Data Edition — A free online conference focusing on generative AI and data innovations. Available in multiple Regions: APJC and EMEA (March 6), North America (March 13), Greater China Region (March 14), and Latin America (April 8).

Browse more upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual developer-focused events.

That’s it for this week! See you next time 🙂

Matheus Guimaraes | @codingmatheus

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Step Functions, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon Q Developer, and more (February 10, 2024) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.