Many events are taking place in this period! Last week I was at the AI Week in Italy. This week I’ll be in Zurich for the AWS Community Day – Switzerland. On May 22, you can join us remotely for AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day to learn about cutting-edge advances across compute, AI/ML, storage, networking, serverless technologies, and global infrastructure. Look for events near you for an opportunity to share your knowledge and learn from others.

What got me particularly excited last Friday was the introduction of Strands Agents, an open source SDK that you can use to build and run AI agents in just a few lines of code. It can scale from simple to complex use cases, including local development and production deployment. By default, it uses Amazon Bedrock as model provider, but many others are supported, including Ollama (to run models locally), Anthropic, Llama API, and LiteLLM (to provide a unified interface for other providers such as Mistral).

With Strands, you can use any Python function as a tool for your agent with the @tool decorator. Strands provides many example tools for manipulating files, making API requests, and interacting with AWS APIs. You can also choose from thousands of published Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, including this suite of specialized MCP servers that help you get the most out of AWS. Multiple teams at AWS already use Strands for their AI agents in production, including Amazon Q Developer, AWS Glue, and VPC Reachability Analyzer. Read it all in Clare’s post.

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

• AWS Transform for .NET, the first agentic AI service for modernizing .NET applications at scale – Compared to the preview, we added new capabilities to support projects with private NuGet packages, porting model-view-controller (MVC) Razor views to ASP .NET Core Razor views, and running the ported unit tests.
• Accelerate the modernization of Mainframe and VMware workloads with AWS Transform – To automate assessment, planning, and transformation of both mainframe and VMware workloads into cloud-based architectures, streamlining the entire process.
• Amazon Bedrock Guardrails now supports cross-Region inference – Amazon Bedrock Guardrails provides configurable safeguards when invoking any model including those hosted in Amazon Bedrock, self-hosted models, and third-party models outside Bedrock using the ApplyGuardrail API, providing a consistent experience to help standardize safety and privacy controls. With this new capability, you get consistent throughput and enhanced resilience during periods of peak demand.
• Amazon VPC adds CloudTrail logging for VPC resources created by default – Now, at the time of creation or deletion of the VPC, you can con view events that trigger the creation or deletion of default resources such as security group, network access control list (ACL), and route table. This provides improved visibility of VPC resources and can help you in auditing and governance.
• AWS EC2 instances now support ENA queue allocation for your network interfaces – Elastic network adapter (ENA) queues are key components of elastic network interfaces (ENIs) to help efficiently manage network traffic by load balancing sent and received data across available queues. This flexible ENA queue allocation enables maximum vCPU utilization through optimized resource distribution. Network-intensive applications can be allocated more queues, and CPU-intensive applications can operate with fewer queues.
• New Amazon EC2 P6-B200 instances powered by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs to accelerate AI innovations – These instances are especially well-suited for large-scale distributed AI training and inferencing for foundation models (FMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) and distillation, multimodal training and inference, and high performance computing (HPC) applications such as climate modeling, drug discovery, seismic analysis, and insurance risk modeling.
• AWS Control Tower introduces account-level reporting for baseline APIs – Now you can use baseline status to view enrollment for your accounts and use drift status to identify when account and organizational unit (OU) baseline configurations are out of sync.
• Simplify AWS AppSync Events integration with Powertools for AWS Lambda – Powertools for AWS is a developer toolkit that includes observability, batch processing, AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store integration, idempotency, feature flags, Amazon CloudWatch metrics, structured logging, and more. Powertools for AWS now supports AppSync Events through the new resolver, available in Python, TypeScript, and .NET.
• Accelerate CI/CD pipelines with the new AWS CodeBuild Docker Server capability – You can now provision a fully managed Docker server that reduces wait times, increases overall efficiency, and can maintain a persistent cache across builds.
• AWS CodePipeline now supports deploying to AWS Lambda with traffic shifting – To publish Lambda function updates using either linear or canary deployment patterns.
• Amazon Cognito now supports OIDC prompt parameter – To choose if users should reauthenticate explicitly (maintaining their existing authenticated sessions) or have a silent check on their authentication state.

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

• Securing Amazon S3 presigned URLs for serverless applications – Focusing on the security ramifications of using Amazon S3 presigned URLs, explaining mitigation steps that developers can take to improve the security of their systems using S3 presigned URLs, and walking through an AWS Lambda function that adheres to the provided recommendations.
• Running GenAI Inference with AWS Graviton and Arcee AI Models – While large language models (LLMs) are capable of a wide variety of tasks, they require compute resources to support hundreds of billions and sometimes trillions of parameters. Small language models (SLMs) in contrast typically have a range of 3 to 15 billion parameters and can provide responses more efficiently. In this post, we share how to optimize SLM inference workloads using AWS Graviton based instances.

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: Dubai (May 21), Tel Aviv (May 28), Singapore (May 29), Stockholm (June 4), Sydney (June 4–5), Washington (June 10-11), and Madrid (June 11)
• AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day – On May 22, discover the latest innovations in AWS Cloud infrastructure technologies at this exclusive technical event.
• 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 Partners Events – You’ll find a variety of AWS Partner events that will inspire and educate you, whether you’re just getting started on your cloud journey or you’re looking to solve new business challenges.
• 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: Zurich, Switzerland (May 22), Bengaluru, India (May 23), Yerevan, Armenia (May 24), Milwaukee, USA (June 5), and Nairobi, Kenya (June 14)

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

– Danilo

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Strands Agents, AWS Transform, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, AWS CodeBuild, and more (May 19, 2025) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the fifth annual AWS Pi Day on March 14. Since its inception in 2021, commemorating the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) 15th anniversary, AWS Pi Day has grown into a flagship event highlighting the transformative power of cloud technologies in data management, analytics, and AI.

This year’s virtual event featured in-depth discussions with Amazon Web Services (AWS) product teams showcasing our continued innovation in helping customers build robust data foundations for analytics and AI workloads.

Missed the live event? You can still access all content on-demand at the event page. Whether you’re developing data lakehouses, training AI models, creating generative AI applications, or optimizing analytics workloads, the shared insights will help you maximize the value of your data.

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

Amazon Bedrock now supports multi-agent collaboration – With the availability of multi-agent collaboration in Amazon Bedrock, you can create networks of specialized agents that communicate and coordinate under the guidance of a supervisor agent. You can build, deploy, and manage networks of AI agents that work together to execute complex, multi-step workflows efficiently.

Availability of fully managed DeepSeek-R1 model in Amazon Bedrock – AWS is the first cloud service provider (CSP) to deliver DeepSeek-R1 as a fully managed, generally available model. Use the capabilities of DeepSeek-R1 for your generative AI applications with a single API through this fully managed service in Amazon Bedrock.

Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio is now generally available – You can now use Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio as your single data and AI development environment, where you can find and access all of your organization’s data and work using the best tools for your specific needs. With the new simplified permissions management, you can easily bring your existing AWS resources into the unified studio. You’ll be able to find, access, and query your organization’s data and AI assets while collaborating with your team to securely build and share your analytics and AI artifacts—from data and models to generative AI applications.

Amazon Bedrock’s capabilities now generally available within Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio – SageMaker Unified Studio brings selected capabilities from Amazon Bedrock into SageMaker. You can now rapidly prototype, customize, and share generative AI applications using foundation models (FMs) and advanced features such as Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, Amazon Bedrock Agents, and Amazon Bedrock Flows to create tailored solutions aligned with your requirements and responsible AI guidelines all within SageMaker.

Amazon S3 Tables integration with Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse is now generally available – Amazon S3 Tables now seamlessly integrate with Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse, making it easy for you to query and join S3 Tables with data in S3 data lakes, Amazon Redshift data warehouses, and third-party data sources. S3 Tables deliver the first cloud object store with built-in Apache Iceberg support.

Amazon S3 Tables now support create and query table operations directly from the S3 console using Amazon Athena – Amazon S3 Tables adds create and query table support in the S3 console. With this new feature, you can now create a table, populate it with data, and query it directly from the S3 console using Amazon Athena, making it easier to get started and analyze data in S3 table buckets.

Amazon S3 reduces pricing for S3 object tagging by 35% – Amazon S3 reduces pricing for S3 object tagging by 35% in all AWS Regions to $0.0065 per 10,000 tags per month. Object tags are key-value pairs applied to S3 objects that can be created, updated, or deleted at any time during the lifetime of the object.

Serverless Land Patterns available in Visual Studio Code – Serverless Land‘s extensive application pattern library is now available directly into the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) IDE, making it easier for developers to build serverless applications. This integration eliminates the need to switch between your development environment and external resources when building serverless architectures by enabling you to browse, search, and implement pre-built serverless patterns directly in VS Code IDE.

Amplify Hosting Announces Skew Protection Support – AWS Amplify Hosting now offers Skew Protection, a feature that guarantees version consistency across your deployments. This feature ensures frontend requests are always routed to the correct server backend version—eliminating version skew and making deployments more reliable.

Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow introduces a new visual editor to improve DNS policy editing – Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow now offers an enhanced user interface for improved DNS traffic policy editing. With this release, you can more easily understand and change the way traffic is routed between users and endpoints using the new features of the visual editor.

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.

Seamless SQL Server Recovery on EC2 with AWS Systems Manager (Greg Vinton) – This guide explains how to use the AWSEC2-RestoreSqlServerDatabaseWithVss automation runbook to restore a Microsoft SQL Server database on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance.

Secure Deployment Strategies in Amazon EKS with Azure DevOps (Abhishek Nanda) – Build and Deploy containerized applications on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) using Azure DevOps.

Connect Your Favorite LLM Client to Bedrock (Qinjie Zhang) – It’s common to use desktop applications like MSTY, Chatbox AI, LM Studio to simplify the use of Large Language Models (LLM) models. This blog provides a step-by-step guide on how you can connect your favorite local LLM clients to Amazon Bedrock.

From PHP to Python with the help of Amazon Q Developer (Ricardo Sueiras) – In this blog post, Ricardo showcases how to use Amazon Q Developer CLI to refactor code from one programming language to another.

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 in Latin America on 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 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!

– Prasad

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

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The post AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Pi Day, Amazon Bedrock multi-agent collaboration, Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, Amazon S3 Tables, and more 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.

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

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

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

Last week’s launches

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

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

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

Database and analytics

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

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

Generative AI and machine learning

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

Management and governance

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

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

Other AWS news and highlights

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Betty

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

Today, I’m excited to introduce a new and improved version of AWS Systems Manager that brings a highly requested cross-account, and cross-Region experience for managing nodes at scale.

The new System Manager experience provides centralized visibility of all your managed nodes which include various infrastructure types, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, containers, virtual machines on other cloud providers, on-premise servers, and edge Internet of Things (IoT) devices. They are referred to as “managed nodes” when they have the Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) installed and are connected to Systems Manager.

If an SSM Agent stops working on a node for whatever reason, then Systems Manager loses connection to it and that node is then referred to as an “unmanaged node.” With the new update, Systems Manager can also help you to easily discover and troubleshoot unmanaged nodes. You can run and even schedule an automated diagnosis that provides you with recommended runbooks that you can execute to fix any issues and reestablish connection so they become managed nodes again.

Systems Manager is also now integrated with Amazon Q Developer, the most capable generative AI–powered assistant for software development. You can ask questions about your managed nodes to Amazon Q Developer using natural language and it will provide you with rapid insights plus links straight to Systems Manager where you can perform actions or continue to explore further.

With this release, you can also use AWS Organizations, to allow a delegated administrator to centrally manage nodes across the organization thanks to the new integration with Systems Manager.

Let’s examine a quick example that helps to demonstrate some of these new capabilities.

Imagine a scenario where you are a cloud platform engineer leading a migration plan aiming to replace all nodes running Windows Server 2016 Datacenter in the organization. Let’s use the new Systems Manager experience to quickly gather information about all the nodes that needs to be included in our plan.

Step 1 – Asking Amazon Q Developer
The easiest starting point is using Amazon Q Developer to ask what you want to find using natural language. Using the AWS Console, I open the Amazon Q chatbot and type Find all of my managed nodes running Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Datacenter in my organization.

Amazon Q quickly comes back with an answer: it tells us that there are ten nodes that fit the criteria and provides a list with an overview of each one.

There is also a link that redirects to the new Explore nodes page in System Manager where we can learn more information. Let’s follow it.

Step 2 – Reviewing our infrastructure
The Explore nodes page provides a comprehensive overview of all managed nodes across your organization, with options to group and filter results for quick access. In this case, we can see that the results are already filtered by Operating system name providing us with a list of all the nodes that are running Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Datacenter.

This is a great start! We could just finish here by downloading the report and add those nodes to our migration plan, however, this page only shows you information about your managed nodes. Could it be that there are unmanaged nodes that need to included in our plan? Let’s find out.

Step 3 – Handling unmanaged nodes
Open the menu, and navigate to the Review node insights page. Here you can see a dashboard with widgets that provide insightful interactive charts that you can use to drill down and discover more information about your nodes or even take actions. For example, the Managed node types pie chart shows the types of managed nodes we have whereas the SSM Agent versions graph provides us with an overview of all the different versions of SSM Agent running on them. You can also customize this view by adding and replacing widgets.

We want to investigate any unmanaged nodes to make sure we don’t miss any that may need to be added to our migration plan. The Node summary widget clearly shows that there are two unmanaged nodes. This could mean that these nodes don’t have the SSM Agent installed in which case we will need to investigate them manually. However, it could also just mean there are issues with the SSM agent permissions or network connectivity preventing Systems Manager from managing these nodes and treating them like any other managed node. The new Systems Manager experience allows you easily troubleshoot and remediate SSM Agents issues so let’s attempt to do this now.

Start by selecting the piece of the chart displaying our unmanaged nodes. This pops up an option to initiate a comprehensive diagnosis of all our unmanaged nodes with only one click. Let’s run this.

The diagnosis reviews key configurations such as missing virtual private cloud (VPC) endpoints, misconfigured VPC DNS settings, and misconfigured instance security groups that may be preventing the SSM Agent from connecting to Systems Manager. After the scanning is complete, we can see that it displays two Misconfigured VPC endpoint findings. It also gives you a link that you can use to open a side panel containing a recommended runbook that you can execute to solve the issues as well as links to relevant documentation.

Choosing to execute the recommended runbook presents you with a detailed preview of the changes which include a thorough overview of the actions it’s going to take in addition to the input parameters used, a link to view a breakdown of the steps involved, and the target nodes for this execution.

Let’s choose to go ahead and select Execute. Keep in mind that this may incur costs, so make sure to review them before executing. You can keep an eye on progress on this page as it goes through the steps to attempt to fix the issues on each node.

Aha! After the remediation is complete, we can see that Systems Manager has found and corrected issues with the SSM Agent with two nodes. This means that Systems Manager is able to connect with the SSM Agent running in those nodes successfully making them “managed nodes.” We can verify this by returning to the Explore nodes page and noticing that the count of “unmanaged nodes” has been reduced to zero now.

Now that all of our nodes are managed, we’re ready to get a full list of all of those that need to be added to our migration plan.

Step 4 – Downloading a report
Back on the Explore nodes page we can see that the count for nodes running Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Datacenter has gone up from ten to twelve! That means that those previously unmanaged nodes that we fixed through the automated diagnosis are indeed running our target operating system.

This is exactly what we need so we choose to download a Report. You give it a file name, and then choose from a few options such as which columns to include. In this case, we choose to download a CSV file with a row containing the column names.

That’s it! We have our CSV with detailed information about the nodes that need upgrading across our entire infrastructure. And the best part? You can also use Systems Manager to automate the upgrade once you’re ready to go ahead with the migration.

Conclusion
Systems Manager is a critical tool for gaining visibility and control over your compute infrastructure and performing operational actions at scale. The new experience offers a centralized cross-account, cross-Region view of all your nodes in your AWS accounts, on-premises, and multicloud environments through a centralized dashboard, offering integration with Amazon Q Developer for natural language queries, and one-click SSM Agent troubleshooting. You can enable the new experience at no extra cost by navigating to the Systems Manager console and following the straightforward instructions.

To learn more, see the documentation for more detail about the new Systems Manager experience.

Check out this interactive demo for a full visual tour of this experience.

The post Introducing a new experience for AWS Systems Manager appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.